Brigitte Seim is a political scientist focused on the political economy of global policy, particularly threats to global democracy and democratic governance and accountability. She is interested in two related but distinct themes of research: one considers how accountability mechanisms can be perverted or disrupted when institutions are weak or states are developing; and the other considers the methods and data used to study global democracy, governance, and accountability. To conduct this research, she partners with government institutions, international organizations, and policymakers, as well as other academics.

She obtained her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2014. For the 2014-2015 academic year, she was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. In 2015, she joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the Department of Public Policy. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Global Policy at Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. She is also Project Manager of Experiments for the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project and a founding Principal Investigator of the Digital Society Project, both cross-national data projects providing publicly available political data.