Editorial Team 2004-2010

Academic Board of Editors

Ted Becker

Ted Becker earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1964. He is currently the Auburn Alumni Association Professor of Political Science at Auburn University. In addition to his Ph.D., he is also a lawyer (J.D., Rutgers, 1956). Dr. Becker is a political activist trying to link teledemocracy, direct democracy, and environmental sustainability. He is the author of 12 books, including The Future of Teledemocracy (Praeger 2000) with his co-author, Christa Daryl Slaton. His latest book is The Last, Lost Empire: Why America Flounders in Early Post Imperial Times (2009 ad infinitum) which is an endless digital book that can be found at www.nsspress.com

Lisa Blomgren Bingham

Lisa Blomgren Bingham is the Keller-Runden Professor of Public Service at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Bloomington. She is also a faculty member with the Workshop of Political Theory and Policy Analysis founded by Elinor Ostrom in the Political Science Department, and is part of an interdisciplinary workshop at IU in the Poynter Center on Ethics. She has visited as a research fellow at the University of Aberdeen Law Faculty (2003), served as a visiting professor of law at UC Hastings College of the Law (2007). A graduate of Smith College (A.B. 1976 magna cum laude with high honors in Greek) and the University of Connecticut School of Law (J.D. 1979 with high honors), she has co-edited three books and authored over sixty articles and book chapters on dispute resolution and collaborative governance. Bingham received Association for Conflict Resolution’s Abner Award in 2002 for excellence in research on dispute resolution in public employment, and conference paper awards from the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution (2004), Industrial Relations Research Association (1997, 1998), and International Association for Conflict Management (1994, 2004). With Professor Rosemary O’Leary, she received the Section of Environmental and Natural Resource Administration of the American Society of Public Administration’s Best Book award for The Promise and Performance of Environmental Conflict Resolution (2005). In 2006, she received the Rubin Theory-to-Practice Award from IACM and Harvard Project on Negotiation for research that makes a significant impact on practice. In 2007, she was elected fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration.

Michael Briand

Michael Briand received his doctorate in political theory from the Johns Hopkins University. He is a Senior Fellow with the Institute on the Common Good at Regis University in Denver. He is also an Associate of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Recently he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the
soon-to-be-launched International Journal of Public Participation. In 1988 Dr. Briand organized and conducted the first-ever face-to-face meeting between representatives of the South African government, white conservative critics of the regime, and black opponents of apartheid. The success of the “Williamsburg Conference” is chronicled in his book, Dialogue in Williamsburg: The Turning Point for South Africa? His most recent book-length publication is Practical Politics: Five Principles for a Community That Works (University of Illinois, 1999).

Frank Bryan

Frank Bryan earned his Ph.D. from University of Connecticut. He is currently a political scientist at the University of Vermont, known throughout New England both as a humourist and a serious scholar. Among the books he has written are Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works; The Vermont Papers; and The Vermont Owner’s Manual. He has been chosen “one of New England’s leading humourists” by Yankee magazine; and the Boston Globe credited him with writing “one of the most original political analyses ever written about New England.” Nationally his work has drawn the attention of such publications as the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Los
Angeles Times.

Martín Carcasson

Martín Carcasson earned his Ph.D. in Communication from Texas A&M University. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Speech Communication at Colorado State University and the Director of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation (CPD), which he founded in 2006. The CPD is an affiliate of the National Issues Forum network and a member organization of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. Working in partnerships with local governments, school boards, and community organizations, the CPD is dedicated to enhancing local democracy through improved public communication, community problem solving, and collaborative decision-making. CSU undergraduates as well as community members are trained to serve as impartial conveners, facilitators, and reporters of public forums at CPD workshops, and then host events on a variety of issues throughout the year. For more information, visit the CPD website at www.cpd.colostate.edu.

Lyn Carson

Lyn Carson has earned her Ph.D. from Southern Cross University. She is currently Academic Program Director for the United States Studies Centre at The University of Sydney, Australia. With Brian Martin she wrote Random Selection in Politics (Praeger 1999). She has participated in many deliberative projects including Australia’s first consensus conference, Australia’s first two deliberative polls, a number of citizens’ juries, and a combined citizen’s panel and televote.

Vera Shattan Coelho

Vera Shattan Coelho received her Ph.D. in Government and Public Policies from the Campinas State University in 1996. She is a researcher and project coordinator at the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) in Sao Paulo, Brazil and taught at the University of Sao Paulo. Her interests involve new forms of citizen participation, deliberation, and consultation to improve social policies and democracy. She is the author of numerous articles on health policy, pension reform, and citizen-government. She recently edited Pension Reform in Latin America (Getulio Vargas Press, 2003) and co-edited New Democratic Spaces for the Institute of Development Studies (University of
Sussex, 2004).

John Dryzek

John Dryzek received his Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland. He is currently head of the Social and Political Theory Program at the Australian National University. He is a former editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science and Fellow of the Academy of the Social
Sciences in Australia.

Cynthia Farrar

Cynthia Farrar currently serves as Director of Urban Academic Initiatives in the Office of New Haven and State Affairs at Yale University. She also serves as Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science. In addition, Dr. Farrar serves as Assistant Vice President for Urban Policy Development in which she is responsible defining Yale University’s role in community development.

Will Friedman

Will Friedman obtained his Ph.D. in American government and politics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is executive vice president at Public Agenda, where he founded the organization’s public engagement department in 1996. He is also executive director of Public Agenda’s Center for Advances in Public Engagement, a new research and field-building initiative. Previously he was associate director of research at Public Agenda and director of policy studies at the Work in American Institute. His recent research on public engagement and deliberative democracy focuses on practical and theoretical issues of scope, power, framing and deliberative impacts.

Archon Fung

Archon Fung is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His research examines the impacts of civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency upon public and private governance. His Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2004) examines two participatory-democratic reform efforts in low-income Chicago neighborhoods. He has published half a dozen books in this field, and his articles on regulation, rights, and participation appear in Politics and Society, Governance, Environmental Management, American Behavioral Scientist, and Boston Review.

John Gastil

John Gastil received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994. He is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, where he studies political deliberation and group decision making. Gastil is the author of two recent Sage volumes — The Group in Society (2009) and Political Communication and Deliberation (2008) — as well as By Popular Demand: Revitalizing Representative Democracy through Deliberative Elections (University of California, 2000) and Democracy in Small Groups (New Society Publishers, 1993). He is also co-editor of The Deliberative Democracy Handbook (Jossey-Bass, 2005) and the author of articles that have appeared in Communication Theory, Harvard Law Review, Human Communication Research, Political Communication, Small Group Research, and other journals.

Carolyn Hendriks

Carolyn Hendriks teaches and researches at the Crawford School of Economics at the Australian National University (ANU). Over the past twelve years she has worked as a researcher in consulting and academic environments based in Australia and Europe, including Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. Carolyn has a PhD in political science from the Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU. She published, taught and conducted workshops on the practice and theory of deliberative governance. Carolyn is especially interested in how empirical studies of public policy can inform our understanding and practice of democratic ideals such as inclusion, representation, deliberation and public engagement. She has published on these themes in various international journals including Policy Sciences, Politics and Society, Public Administration, and Political Studies.

Alison Kadlec

Alison Kadlec is a Senior Public Engagement Research Associate and Associate Director of the Center for Advances in Public Engagement (CAPE) at the nonprofit, non-partisan opinion research and public engagement organization Public Agenda in New York. She works on the management and implementation of Public Agenda’s public engagement and opinion research projects. She is active in the development and evaluation of research tools and reports, and in training and evaluation for public engagement projects. Previously, Alison has been a visiting professor and lecturer in the political science departments at the University of Minnesota, Macalester College, Baruch College and Hunter College. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota, with a focus in political theory. Her fields of interest are democratic theory, modern and contemporary political theory, history of ideas, hermeneutics, and American political thought. Alison is the author of a recent book on the democratic theory of John Dewey titled, “John Dewey’s Critical Pragmatism.”

Ethan J. Leib

Ethan J. Leib is Associate Professor of Law at the University of California — Hastings College of the Law. He was a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School in Spring 2009 and will be a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at UC-Berkeley Law School in Spring 2010. He is the author of Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government (2004) and co-editor of The Search for Deliberative Democracy in China (2006). A new version of the latter is forthcoming in paperback in 2010. His writings on democracy have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Election Law Journal, The Good Society, Constitutional Commentary, and elsewhere.

Peter Levine

Peter Levine earned his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1992. He is now a Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. Dr. Levine is also an Associate at the Charles Kettering foundation and Deputy Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The New Progressive Era: Toward a Fair and Deliberative Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

Jane Mansbridge

Jane Mansbridge has a PhD from the Government Department at Harvard. She is Adams Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her current research includes the relation between coercion and deliberative democracy and innovations in representation. She is the author of Beyond Self-Interest and editor of Oppositional Consciousness (with Aldon Morris).

Peter Muhlberger

Peter Muhlberger is a Research Assistant Professor in the College of Mass Communications at Texas Tech University. He is an author of the Virtual Agora Project and the Deliberative E-Rulemaking Project, National Science Foundation grant projects investigating the social and psychological effects of computer-mediated deliberative democracy and community. Prof. Muhlberger’s received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan. His current research interests include: media effects in democratic deliberation, deliberative norms, communicative rationality, political agency and identity, ethical reasoning, social capital, ideology and belief systems, and automated text analysis. A selected list of his papers can be found at: http://communityconnections.heinz.cmu.edu/papers.

Tina Nabatchi

Tina Nabatchi is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her research interests include public management, public policy, and law, particularly in relation to deliberative democracy, collaborative governance, and conflict resolution. Tina is particularly interested in empirical investigations and evaluations that examine the intrinsic and instrumental outcomes of deliberative processes, as well as studies that focus on legitimacy building and the institutionalization of such process in the work of government. Tina has published numerous book chapters and several articles in journals such as Public Administration Review, National Civic Review, The International Journal of Conflict Management, and The International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior. She has presented her research at numerous academic and practitioner-based conferences, including the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM), the Mid-West Political Science Association (MPSA), and the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR). Tina holds a B.A. in political science from The American University, a Masters of Public Administration degree from The University of Vermont, and a Ph. D. in Public Affairs from Indiana University.

Tomas Ohlin

Tomas Ohlin earned his Ph.D. in Information Processing, however this did not stop him from becoming an innovative and original thinker about electronic democracy. He is currently working as a “free consultant” on teledemocracy, following a stint with the Ministry of Public Administration in Stockholm. Dr. Ohlin is now retired from Linkoping University on the subject of Information Systems. He has written three books.

Francesca Polletta

Francesca Polletta received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1994. She is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at University of California at Irvine. She studies social movements and institutional experiments in democracy. She is also author of Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements and co-editor of Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements.

Matt Qvortrup

Matt Qvortrup is a Senior Research Fellow at University College London. Having earned his doctorate in Politics from Brasenose College, University of Oxford, Dr. Qvortrup has taught at the London School of Economics (2001-2004). From 2004-2008, he was Chair of Political Science at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. He has previously been a visiting Professor at University of Sydney.

Described by the BBC as “the World’s leading authority on referendums”, Professor Qvortrup has worked as a consultant on elections and referendums for the US State Department, Elections Canada, the UK Electoral Commission. He is currently affiliated to the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) as an expert on referendums and electoral administration and has serves an advisor the US State Department.

An expert on ‘direct democracy’, Dr Qvortrup won a competitive ESRC grant to analyze how public
engagement could improve delivery and implementation of environmental policies. This study was
cited by the ESRC as a “model study”. He has written several books, including A Comparative Study
of Referendums, Second Edition 2005.

Jonathan Rose

Jonathan Rose earned his Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1993 where he is Associate Professor of Political Studies and Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Democracy. His past writing has been on mass media, political communication and federalism. He is the author of Making Pictures in Our Heads: Government Advertising in Canada (Praeger), co-editor of a book on federalism and lead author of a simulation book on political negotiation that has been translated into Spanish and French. In 2007, he had the privilege of being the Academic Director of the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. His present project is an examination of citizens’ assemblies in British Columbia, Ontario and the Netherlands. The book he is writing with R. Kenneth Carty, Andre Blais, Patrick Founier and Henk VanderKolk will be the first to examine how citizens’ assemblies reason, work and deliberate. From January to July 2008, Jonathan is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

David M. Ryfe

David M. Ryfe begins work as an Associate Professor in the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno in July 2006. He received his Ph.D. in communication from the University of California, San Diego. As a research assistant for the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture, and Politics, and then as a research consultant for the Kettering Foundation, over the last decade he has had a front-row seat to the growth of deliberation in communities across the United States. His previous research includes nearly twenty journal articles and book chapters—many of which examine some facet of the practice of deliberation—as well as a book titled Presidents in Culture: the meaning of presidential communication (Peter Lang, 2005). He is currently conducting an ethnographic study of Community Conversations, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting deliberation in Owensboro, KY.

Peter Shane

Peter Shane directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. He founded Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society (InSITeS), where he helped to launch the Community Connections Project and is Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded Virtual Agora Project. His research interests include constitutional and administrative law, as well as cyberdemocracy, and he is both editor of and contributor to Democracy Online: The Prospects for Political Renewal Through the Internet (Routledge 2004).

J. H. Snider

J. H. Snider received his doctorate in American Government from Northwestern University and his M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School. He currently is a research director at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan Washington, DC think tank, where he specializes in media policy. Prior to coming to the New America Foundation he served in the U.S. Senate on the staffs of Senators Wyden and Leahy as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in Communications and Public Policy. Prior to attending graduate school in political science, Snider was active in Vermont politics, serving on the school board in Burlington, Vermont, chairing a task force for Vermont’s Secretary of State on Information and Democracy, and serving on the board of the Vermont Chapter of Common Cause.

Jennifer Stromer-Galley

Jennifer Stromer-Galley earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her current research focuses on the process and content of citizen political deliberations. She is especially interested in understanding how structure affects deliberation – specifically how different channels for interaction affect the process, content, and outcomes of deliberations.

Nancy Thomas

Nancy Thomas earned her doctorate in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1996 and her JD from Case Western Reserve University in 1984. She directs the Democracy Imperative, a national network and resource center for advancing democracy in and through higher education, located at the University of New Hampshire. For eight years, she has also served as a senior associate with Everyday Democracy (formerly Study Circles Resource Center). Her interests are in democratic education and engagement, teaching and managing political controversy in the classroom and across campus, academic freedom and First Amendment rights on campus, and democratic institutional governance. She is the author of many book chapters, journal articles, and other publications on teaching and learning for a diverse democracy.

Stuart White

Stuart White is the Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney (Australia). His research is in the area of decision making, public policy, resource use and taxation. He has been involved with a number of deliberative designs in Australia. His interests include the use of deliberative methods for decision making in relation to key resource allocation issues and the role of self-interest.

Patricia A. Wilson

Patricia A. Wilson is a Professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas, Austin, teaches participatory planning and directs the Civic Engagement Initiative at the U.T. Center for Sustainable Development. Her interest in civic engagement grew out of her work in decentralization, local governance, and community empowerment in Latin America in the 1980s. Currently she brings a keen interest in group process, systems thinking, and collaborative decision-making to the arena of citizen participation. Her most recent publications have dealt with New Orleans recovery planning, women’s empowerment in rural India, and deep democracy. She received her doctorate from Cornell University in Regional Planning.