The Democracy Machine project relies on a team of more than a dozen collaborators to design digital innovations, conduct studies, and present findings. Penn State professor John Gastil leads the project, but as with his previous studies on the jury system and electoral reform, a large team of junior and senior colleagues does the work together and shares the credit.
John Gastil is a Distinguished Professor in Communication Arts & Sciences and Political Science and Senior Scholar at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. He studies public deliberation, political communication, group behavior, and democratic innovation.
Kristinn Már Ársælsson is an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at Duke Kunshan University. Their research centers on democratic challenges and innovations. Kristinn investigates whether citizen assemblies can help inform and influence the wider electorate, the relationship between democratic participation and civic behavior and values, and other subjects.
Dave Brinker studies deliberative democratic innovation, political participation, and how people build mutual understanding. His doctoral studies at Penn State University and subsequent work at the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education developed his expertise in experimentation, survey research, and administrative data analysis.
Jonathan E. Collins is an assistant professor of Education, political science, and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. His research examines how democratic processes can improve the educational experiences of students in low-income and minoritized communities, as well as African American engagement with American democracy more generally.
Todd Davies is associate director and lecturer in the Symbolic Systems Program and a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, at Stanford University. His research focuses on digital democracy, deliberation, social decision making, information policy, and collective behavior.
Kara Dillard is a Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at James Madison University and Co-Director of the Institute for Constructive Advocacy and Dialogue at JMU. She studies design mechanics of online deliberation and the impact of deliberative facilitators.
Andrea Felicetti is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore. He studies democratic theory and practice, including a wide range of topics such as social movements, governance and innovations, civil society, deliberation in the workplace, and the environment.
Eric Gordon is a visiting professor in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and professor at Emerson College, where he directs the Engagement Lab. He studies role of play and creativity in civic life, digital civic media, innovation in government and organizations, and efforts to create equitable and creative “smart cities.”
Kimmo Grönlund is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Social Science Research Institute at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He conducts research in public opinion and democratic innovations, especially experiments in citizen deliberation. He is the leader of the Finnish Research Infrastructure of Public Opinion FIRIPO.
Ryan Kennedy is an associate professor of political science and director of the Machine-Assisted Human Decision Making (MAHD) Lab at the University of Houston. He studies applications of machine learning and AI in public policy, public deliberation, and experimental research.
Amy Lee is the Associate Director of the Institute for Democratic Engagement & Accountability. Previously, she was a program officer for eight years at the Kettering Foundation. Her focus is developing and testing practical innovations to make democracy both more participatory and deliberative.
Rousiley C. M. Maia is Professor of Political Communication at the Federal University of Minas Gerais; member of the Institute for Democracy and Democratization of Communication and coordinator of the Media and Public Sphere Research Group (EME/UFMG).
Idit Manosevitch is the Head of the Department of Communication at Kinneret Academic College on the Sea of Galilee, Israel. Her research areas include deliberative pedagogy, online deliberation, participatory journalism, and other topics related to political communication.
Lala Muradova is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Communication at Dublin City University and Associate Teaching Fellow in Comparative Politics at the University of Barcelona. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of political communication, psychology and democratic theory.
Beth Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Family Center for Global Impact and its partner project, The Governance Lab (GovLab). She studies public engagement in lawmaking (CrowdLaw), the expert-sourcing of innovative solutions to hard problems (Smarter Crowdsourcing), co-creation between cities and citizens, and many other subjects.
Chul Hyun Park is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. He studies open and collaborative governance between government and non-state stakeholders, with a particular interest in emerging technologies that enable multiple actors across the public, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors to collaborate.
Anna Przybylska is associate professor and head of the Centre for Deliberation at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw. She was Principal Investigator for the project that developed the inDialogue platform for online public engagement.
Robert C. Richards, Jr. is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, an interdisciplinary affiliate at the Center for Communication Research at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and a co-investigator on the Participedia Project. His research focuses on democratic deliberation, participatory democracy, and online dialogue and discussion.
Patricia Rossini is Senior Lecturer in Communication, Media, and Democracy at the University of Glasgow (from June). Her research focuses on digital threats to democracy, informal political talk online, with an emphasis on incivility and intolerance. She is also interested in computational social science and studies political participation and deliberation.
Matt Ryan is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Associate Professor in Governance and Public Policy, Co-Director of the Centre for Democratic Futures, Policy Director at the Web Science Institute. His research crosses several disciplinary boundaries with a focus on innovation in both research methods and public participation to sustain democracy.
Maija Setälä is a professor in political science at the University of Turku, Finland. She specializes in democratic theory, especially theories of deliberative democracy, political trust, and democratic innovations, such as citizens’ initiatives and deliberative mini-publics.
Borys Tencer is completing a Ph.D. thesis on the civic contribution to a deliberative system in the context of the EU multi-level government. He is conducting his studies at the Centre for Deliberation in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Warsaw.