Research
My research lies at the intersection of political behaviour, political psychology, democratic governance, and deliberative democracy. Across these areas, I am particularly interested in how individuals and groups reason about political problems, how institutions shape political judgement, and how democratic systems can support more inclusive and informed forms of collective decision-making.
A recurring theme in my work is collective reasoning: how people interpret political problems, exchange reasons, update their views, and arrive at individual or collective judgements in different institutional and social settings. I study these processes in citizens’ assemblies and deliberative minipublics, but also in mass publics, experimental settings, online environments, and increasingly in human–AI and multi-agent systems.
Political Behaviour and Political Psychology
A major strand of my research examines the psychological and behavioural foundations of political attitudes and participation.
I am interested in how citizens form and revise political preferences, how they respond to disagreement, and how political identities, emotions, perceptions, and social contexts shape political behaviour. This includes research on:
- political attitudes and preference formation
- political participation and democratic engagement
- polarisation and ideological alignment
- political judgement and reasoning
- attitudes towards democratic institutions
- radicalisation, political extremism, and political violence
This work seeks to understand both the individual-level mechanisms underlying political behaviour and the institutional conditions under which those behaviours change.
Collective Reasoning and Deliberation
A second major area of my research focuses on how individuals reason together.
Deliberation is particularly valuable for studying this question because it makes political reasoning observable: participants formulate arguments, respond to competing considerations, justify their positions, and sometimes revise their judgements.
My research examines the quality and dynamics of these processes across different settings, including:
- citizens’ assemblies and deliberative minipublics
- facilitated group discussions
- survey and experimental environments
- mass-public deliberation
- online and digitally mediated participation
- human–AI interaction
- multi-agent AI deliberation
I am especially interested in whether collective reasoning improves the quality of individual judgement, whether it broadens the range of considerations citizens take into account, and under what conditions it instead reinforces existing biases or divisions.
Democratic Governance and Democratic Innovation
My research also examines how democratic institutions can be designed to improve participation, representation, legitimacy, and decision-making.
I study democratic innovations, particularly citizens’ assemblies and other forms of deliberative participation, as components of broader systems of democratic governance.
Rather than considering these institutions in isolation, I am interested in how they interact with representative institutions, public opinion, administrative structures, and wider political systems.
This research addresses questions such as:
- How should citizens be included in complex policy decisions?
- What makes participatory and deliberative institutions politically consequential?
- How can democratic innovations be integrated into existing systems of governance?
- Under what conditions do these institutions generate legitimacy beyond the participants directly involved?
Artificial Intelligence and Democracy
Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly important component of my research.
I study how large language models and other AI systems may alter political communication, collective reasoning, and democratic participation. My work examines both the potential of AI to support democratic processes and the risks associated with introducing artificial agents into environments traditionally organised around human judgement.
Current research includes:
- AI-supported deliberation and facilitation
- benchmarking LLM reasoning against human judgement
- human–AI deliberation
- multi-agent deliberation and collective intelligence
- AI-generated political arguments and perspectives
- discourse representation and pluralism
- persuasion, manipulation, and strategic behaviour by artificial agents
- institutional design for AI-mediated democratic participation
A central concern is whether AI systems preserve the diversity of perspectives, arguments, and forms of reasoning that democratic processes require, or whether they systematically narrow, distort, or reshape the space of political deliberation.
Democratic Inclusion and Representation
Across these areas, I am interested in democratic inclusion not only in terms of who participates, but also in terms of which perspectives, arguments, and ways of understanding political problems are represented.
This leads me to study discourse representation, epistemic inclusion, and the relationship between diversity and collective reasoning.
In this work, democratic representation is therefore not understood exclusively as the representation of demographic groups or policy preferences. It also concerns whether political processes allow competing interpretations, values, experiences, and forms of reasoning to enter collective decision-making.
Methods
My research combines quantitative, experimental, comparative, and configurational approaches.
I work with:
- experiments and survey experiments
- statistical and multilevel modelling
- computational text analysis
- measurement of political reasoning and deliberative quality
- comparative research designs
- set-theoretic methods
- latent-variable and dimensionality-reduction techniques
- simulations and computational experiments involving large language models
Methodologically, I am particularly interested in developing ways to measure political reasoning, deliberative quality, discourse representation, and collective intelligence across both human and artificial systems.