About Us

Our Team

James S. Fishkin
Director, Deliberative Democracy Lab
Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication
Professor of Communication
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor of Political Science (by courtesy)

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. He is the author of Democracy When the People Are Thinking (Oxford 2018), When the People Speak (Oxford 2009), Deliberation Day  (Yale 2004 with Bruce Ackerman) and Democracy and Deliberation (Yale 1991). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. His work on deliberative democracy has stimulated more than 150 Deliberative Polling® experiments in over 50 countries and jurisdictions. It has been used to help governments and policy makers make important decisions in Texas, China, Mongolia, Japan, Macau, South Korea, Bulgaria, Brazil, Uganda and other countries around the world.

Alice Siu
Associate Director, Deliberative Democracy Lab
Senior Research Fellow, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of the Law

Siu received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, with a focus in political communication, deliberative democracy and public opinion, and her B.A. degrees in Economics and Public Policy and M.A. degree in Political Science, also from Stanford.

Siu has advised policymakers and political leaders around the world, at various levels of government, including leaders in China, Brazil, and Argentina. Her research interests in deliberative democracy include what happens inside deliberation, such as examining the effects of socio-economic class in deliberation, the quality of deliberation, and the quality of arguments in deliberation.

Nelia Peralta
Manager, Deliberative Democracy Lab

Nelia received her B.A. in Business with a concentration in Management Information Systems from Menlo College. She is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the center, including: research and grant administration, financial administration, and providing assistance with program management.

Faculty Collaborators

Larry Diamond
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Bass University Fellow, Undergraduate Education

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. His is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford and the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. He leads several research projects on democracy and security at the Hoover Institution and FSI and is one of the research principals in the America in One Room project. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to reform and advance democracy. His latest book is Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.

Ashish Goel
Professor of Management Science and Engineering
Professor of Computer Science (by courtesy)

Ashish Goel is a Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, and a member of Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1999 to 2002. His research interests lie in the design, analysis, and applications of algorithms; current application areas of interest include social networks, participatory democracy, Internet commerce, and large scale data processing. Professor Goel is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan faculty fellowship (2004-06), a Terman faculty fellowship from Stanford, an NSF Career Award (2002-07), and a Rajeev Motwani mentorship award (2010). He was a co-author on the paper that won the best paper award at WWW 2009, an Edelman Laureate in 2014, and a co-winner of the SigEcom Test of Time Award in 2018.

Professor Goel was a research fellow and technical advisor at Twitter, Inc. from July 2009 to Aug 2014. He currently serves as a technical advisor to Coinbase, Inc.

Research Consultant

Nate Grubman
Program Director 
National Democratic Institute

Research Advisors

Shanto Iyengar
Professor of Political Science

Lawrence Lessig
Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

Robert Luskin
Associate Professor of Government
University of Texas at Austin

Senior Advisors

Norman Bradburn
Distinguished Senior Fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago

Lenny Mendonca
Director Emeritus, McKinsey and Co.

Tom Schnaubelt
Assistant Director, Hoover Institution Center for Revitalizing American Institutions

Daniel Werner
Former President, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions

Gombojavyn Zandanshatar
Speaker of Mongolian Parliament and co-chair Deliberative Polling Advisory Committee in Mongolia

Research Assistant

Young Jee Kim
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Communication