The Economic and Political Effects of Democratic Innovations

One application of the Brazilian Participatory Budgeting Census is the investigation of the impact of Participatory Budgeting on public finance and on political competition. This paper is currently being updated to include new data. The 2010 version of this paper won the Long Young Scholar Award at APSA. One of the results of the 2010 paper, i.e. that PB increases the probability of reelection of mayors, has been used by practitioners around the world as a selling point for participatory budgeting. The more recent version of this analysis, presented at LASA 2015, incorporates the new data collected in 2012 and uncovers that the effect of Brazilian PB degrades over time.

Evaluating the impact of i-voting on participation in multi-channel democratic innovations

This project is based on a survey embedded in the internet voting mechanism of one of the largest multi-channel democratic innovations in the world: Sistema Estadual de Participação Popular e Cidadã in Rio Grande do Sul (1.4 million participants in 2014). The survey was completed by 20,000 respondents and aimed at investigating those participants that self-identified as “online-only participants”. We published part of the research on the The Journal of Information Technology and Politics.

Analyzing the impact of hybrid deliberation on participants attitudes

Between August 2015 and January 2016 I collaborated to the design, implementation and evaluation of two Pilot Hybrid Citizens' Assemblies in the UK. The first one in Sheffield included only citizens, the second one in Southampton included 2/3 citizens and 1/3 local council members. The assemblies sequenced a first face to face weekend of deliberation, with three weeks of online discussion, and a final face to face weekend. The final report on the activity of the assemblies can be found here. For more information about the project see the official website of Democracy Matters the coalition of scholars and practitioners that implemented it. We are using the data collected during these pilots to write multiple papers. For more information contact me via email.

The Impact of Democratic Innovations on Trust, Efficacy and Antipolitics

My most recent project builds upon my work with Democracy Matters and my work with the Empatia project. In both projects I managed to implement the same impact evaluation survey using a pre-post design. Therefore I am currently comparing the impact of participatory budgeting and the impact of citizens' assemblies on trust, efficacy and antipolitics.