Dr Rikki Dean

I am Associate Professor in Politics 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, as well as the ERC-funded project 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.

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 previously taught comparative politics at Goethe University Frankfurt, social policy at the London School of Economics and democratic innovations at the University of Westminster.

I am currently 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), at CEVIPOL, Université Libre de Bruxelles (2022), and the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra (2024).

I hold a PhD and an MSc 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. I also have a BA in Philosophy and Literature and MA in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex.

In 2018, I was awarded the 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. In 2021 I was awarded a Johanna Quandt Young Academy Sabbatical Fellowship for outstanding research in comparative politics.