About
I am Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Co-Director of the Centre for Democratic Futures.
I lead the Integrating Citizen Deliberation for Impact (i4i) Project, funded by the German, Polish and Belgian Science Foundations. I have an ERC-funded research group on Political Process Preferences in Europe (PoPPiE): Rethinking Conceptual, Ontological and Methodological Foundations. I am also a Co-Investigator on the INSPIRE project, which explores how to make participatory processes more inclusive, resilient and embedded, and is funded through the Horizon Europe Programme.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Democratic systems theory
- Democratic innovations
- Political process preferences
- Democracy and public administration
- Digital democracy
Current research
My research combines democratic theory, public administration theory and empirical social science to understand a range of topics relating to democratic governance, including: developing a systemic conception of democracy; evaluating participatory governance projects; understanding the opportunities for democratic innovation represented by new digital technologies; and analysing political actors’ attitudes to democracy.
I have recently completed a book, Democracy, Participation and Public Administration: A Systems Approach, forthcoming with Bristol University Press.
Currently my research is focussed on delivering the three funded projects; i4i, PoPPiE and INSPIRE.
i4i is a comparative analysis of the integration of the European wave of climate assemblies to understand the different ways they have been integrated with the democratic systems and how this determines the kinds of impacts that citizen deliberation can have.
PoPPiE is an mixed-methods exploration of European political actors' political process preferences - that is, how they want to be governed. It attempts to develop a more psychologically and sociologically realistic to understanding these preferences than categorising people into abstract models of democracy.
In the INSPIRE project, I am chiefly responsible for leading a Q-method study of different stakeholders perceptions of inclusion in relation to participatory policy-making initiatives, with the aim of improving their capacity to attract people from marginalised social groups to participate.
Research projects
Active projects
Publications
Teaching
I am currently open to approaches to supervising PhD projects. Contact me if you are interested in conducting a PhD at the University of Southampton on one of the following topics:
- the relationship between public administration and democracy;
- participatory approaches to politics and policy-making;
- the role and integration of deliberative democratic innovations in the political-administrative system;
- political actors’ and public perceptions of democratic governance.
You can find more information about my ongoing projects with which your research could connect on the projects pages of my personal website.
I am not currently teaching BA and MA courses, but have previously taught a range of courses that include:
- Democratic Innovations in Public Administration
- Research Training: Understanding Public Perceptions of Democracy
- Democracy in Crisis?
- Democracy: Past, Present and Future
- New Methods for Analysing Democratic Practice
- Democracy in the Digital Age
- Q-Method: A Practical Introduction.
Biography
I joined the University of Southampton as Associate Professor in Politics in September 2024, following seven years at Goethe University Frankfurt, where I was the Deputy Director of the Democratic Innovations Research Unit and taught comparative politics in the Institute for Political Science.
I remain a Visiting Professor at the Democratic Innovations Research Unit at Goethe University Frankfurt and I have previously held visiting fellowships at:
- Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Innovation and Governance (2015),
- CEVIPOL, Université Libre de Bruxelles (2022), and
- the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra (2024).
My academic background traverses disciplinary boundaries. I hold a PhD in Social Policy from the London School of Economics, where my research focused on participatory innovations in the social policy process. My PhD Thesis, Democratising Bureaucracy received the LSE’s Richard Titmuss Prize for Outstanding Scholarship. This followed an MSc in Social Policy (Research) for which I was also awarded the Richard Titmuss Prize for Outstanding Performance. I also have a BA in Philosophy and Literature and MA in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex.
My work has also been recognised by the 2018 Bleddyn Davies Prize for best Early Career Paper from the journal Policy and Politics for my article Beyond Radicalism and Resignation: The Competing Logics for Public Participation in Policy Decisions, as well as a Johanna Quandt Young Academy Sabbatical Fellowship for outstanding research in comparative politics (2021).