Claudia Chwalisz is a Consultant at Populus. As a Crook Public Service Fellow, her research at the Crick Centre has focused on long-form deliberative processes for public decision-making in Canada and Australia over the past decade. These are forums of up to 50 randomly selected citizens, who meet, learn and deliberate over two to three months, with a remit to propose recommendations to public bodies on a specific policy issue. By putting the problem to the people, giving them information, time to discuss options, to find common ground and to decide what they want, public bodies gain the legitimacy to act on hard choices.
This research will be published in The People’s Verdict: Adding Informed Citizen Voices to Public Decision-making (forthcoming 2017). Claudia is also the author of The Populist Signal: Why Politics and Democracy Need to Change (2015).
As a consultant at Populus, Claudia is bringing this research to life in the UK to help public bodies add a considered public view to policy dilemmas.
She tweets at @ClaudiaChwalisz.