Alan Gerber
Alan Gerber is Sterling Professor of Political Science, director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and professor of economics and of and statistics and data science at Yale University. He also has affiliations in the Yale School of Public Health and the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously he was appointed the Faculty of Arts and Sciences divisional director for the social sciences and became the inaugural FAS dean of social science, serving in this role from 2014 to 2021.
His current research focuses on the political economy of evidence production and use in public policy and organizations. He has published extensively on the application of experimental methods to the study of campaign communications, and he has designed and performed experimental evaluations of many political communications programs, both partisan and non-partisan in nature. His book on field experiments, co-authored with Donald Green, is a widely used resource for researchers seeking to apply field experimental methods to problems in the social sciences.
Hélène Landemore
Hélène Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University with a specialization in political theory and a faculty fellow with Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy Studies, where she leads a research agenda on citizens’ assemblies within Democratic Innovations (a new ISPS program designed to identify and test ideas for improving the quality of democratic representation and governance). She is also a fellow at the Ethics in AI Institute at the University of Oxford and an advisor to the “Democratic Inputs to AI” program at OpenAI. She served on the Governance Committee of the 2022-23 French Citizens’ Convention on end-of-life issues. Her research and teaching interests include, among other things, democratic theory, political epistemology, and the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence. She is currently undertaking work on the ethics and politics of AI supported by Schmidt Futures through the AI2050 program.
Théophile Pénigaud de Mourgues
Théophile Pénigaud de Mourgues is a postdoctoral associate with the Democratic Innovations program at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where he also led a multidisciplinary junior laboratory studying the mutations in democratic practices and theories (2018-2022). His research area is democratic theory, with a special emphasis on democratic innovations such as citizens’ assemblies. His work focuses particularly on the French Convention for Climate (2019-2021) and the French Convention on End of Life (2022-2023), crossing qualitative and quantitative approaches. The key issues he is addressing include the causal relation between inclusive deliberation and sound political judgments – both at the individual and collective levels, the political role and legitimacy of sortition-based democratic innovations, and the conceptual links between justice, democracy, and substantive equality. He published numerous papers and a book in French, and articles in English in the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Antonin Lacelle-Webster
Antonin Lacelle-Webster is a postdoctoral associate with the Democratic Innovations Program at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of British Columbia in 2023. His research focuses primarily on democratic theory, with a particular interest in democratic innovations, political agency, and the politics of hope and disappointment. His current book project theorizes a political, collective, and open-ended conception of hope embedded in democratic practices and spaces and its implications on the study of democracy and political agency. He is also involved with Participedia as a member of the Democratic Representation research cluster and the Editorial Board. His research has been published in books and journals including the European Journal of Political Theory.
Matthew Meyers
Matthew Meyers is a senior in Yale College studying political science and statistics & data science who works as a research assistant on the Governing X conference series. He is the student coordinator of the Democratic Innovations program at the ISPS and leads a student research group studying the effectiveness of democratic technologies such as polis. His senior thesis is on the relationship between technological development and the effectiveness of governmental institutions. He has also worked on the “Voices of the Future” and “America in One Room: Climate and Energy” deliberative polls and interned in the United States Senate and United States Treasury Department.