Claudia Chwalisz has been working on democratic innovation for over a decade, initially sparked by her research on populism and the extent to which it is driven by people’s disillusionment with the political system and with a lack of agency to shape the decisions affecting their lives.

She is the Founder and CEO of DemocracyNext (DemNext), an international foundation working to accelerate the spread of high quality, empowered, and permanent citizens’ assemblies. DemNext works to shift who has power and how we take decisions in government and in institutions of daily life like workplaces, schools, and museums.

The idea of citizens’ assemblies is at the heart of Claudia’s work; she sees these as brave spaces for creative problem solving, designed for exercising our collective intelligence, engaging with complexity, and finding common ground. At their heart are three key ideas – sortition (selecting decision makers by lottery), deliberation (collectively weighing evidence for shared decisions), and rotation (taking turns representing, and being represented by others).

Claudia was involved in designing the world’s first permanent citizens’ assemblies that have a legal basis in Paris, Ostbelgien, and Brussels, as well as numerous others since then.

Claudia co-leads the Tech-Enhanced Citizens’ Assemblies Pop-Up Lab that is a joint initiative between DemNext and the MIT Centre for Constructive Communication. They are advancing the use of AI and technology to improve the quality and legitimacy of assemblies, as well as enable them to spread more easily and quickly.

Claudia is an Obama Leader 2023 and serves on the Advisory Boards of the UN Democracy Fund, MIT Center for Constructive Communication, The Data Tank, and Design & Democracy.

Before founding DemocracyNext, she established and led the OECD’s work on innovative citizen participation from 2018-2022, creating the Deliberative Democracy Toolbox, which includes a public database of over 700 examples of Citizens’ Assemblies, the flagship report Catching the Deliberative Wave (2020), standards for implementation (2020), and guidelines for evaluation and institutionalisation of deliberative assemblies (2021), as well guidelines for citizen participation processes (2022).

She is the author of The Populist Signal: Why Politics and Democracy Need to Change (2015) and The People’s Verdict: Adding Informed Citizen Voices to Public Decision-making (2017), and the co-editor of New Routes to Social Justice (2017) and The Predistribution Agenda (2015).