De Gruyter Handbook of Citizens’ Assemblies

Min Reuchamps is Professor of Political Science at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. His teaching and research interests include federalism and multi-level governance, democracy and its transformations and innovations, participatory and deliberative methods, as well as relations between language(s) and politics and in particular the role of metaphors in political discourse. He has published over twenty books and edited volumes on these topics. In the wake of these works, he initiated the COST Action ‘Constitution-making and deliberative democracy’. He is regularly invited to observe and assess democratic processes as well as to appear in the media and in the public debate. In Belgium, he actively contributed to the design of the Permanent Citizens’ Dialogue of the Parliament of the German-speaking Community and of the mixed parliamentary committees for the Parliament of the Region of Brussels, the French-speaking Parliament in Brussels and the Walloon Parliament, as well as the federal online platform for the future of the country.

Yanina Welp is Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute in Geneva (Switzerland) and co-founder of the Red de Politólogas. Between 2008 and 2018 she was a principal researcher at the Centre for Democracy Studies and co-director of the Zurich Latin American Centre (2016–2019), both at the University of Zurich. She finished her Habilitation in 2015 at the University of St Gallen. She holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the Pompeu Fabra University (Spain) and two Bachelor degrees in Social Communication and Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). Recent representative publications include the The will of the people. Populism and Citizens Participation in Latin America (De Gruyter, 2022), and the edited books The Politics of Recall Elections (Palgrave, 2020) and El diablo está en los detalles. Referéndum y poder político en América Latina ( The Devil is in the Details. Referendum and Political Power in Latin America , PUCP, 2020).

Julien Vrydagh is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Stuttgart working on the ERC funded project "Designing Democracy on Earth and Mars". He has a joint PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the UCLouvain. He is also a research associate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. His PhD thesis investigated the influence of deliberative minipublics on public decisions. His broader research interests include democratic theory, citizen participation, deliberative democracy, systems thinking, and public policy. He has recently published articles in European Political Science Review, Policy Studies, Representation, the Journal of Legislative Studies, and the Journal of Deliberative Democracy.