Engaging citizens on economic policy: what role can deliberative methods play?

Christopher Holmes is Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at King’s College London. He recently led the Citizens’ Economic Council on the Cost of Living project, which applied deliberative research methods to a range of current UK fiscal policy issues. His research focuses on the role of economic ideas in public debate and policy.

Isabel Lee is the Interim Head of Public and Stakeholder Engagement at the Bank of England. The team is responsible for programmes and events that engage directly with members of the public, including schools, charities and community groups. We initiate conversations to understand the impact of the UK economy on individuals, and to raise awareness of the role the Bank plays.

Nicholas Gruen is an independent scholar and CEO of Lateral Economics. He has written and spoken widely on the power of sortition and similar mechanisms to improve the quality of political and organisational deliberation. He is seeking to establish a standing citizen assembly funded initially by philanthropy but ultimately by government with its own constitutional role as a check and balance against the established institutions of government.

Ceri is interested in how the public has a voice in the decisions that shape their lives – be that through democratic means, in policy development, understanding the implications of science and technology and influencing or contributing to the questions that researchers ask. 

She has been working at the intersection of evidence and practice in public participation for over 15 years, through roles in community development, in social research and on not-for-profit boards. The creation and her leadership of the Centre for Delberation continues this general theme – with a focus on bringing social science rigour to an innovative range of research on public attitudes and policy making in the context of democratic innovation.

The Centre's current work tackles large scale societal issues, such as Brexit, the environment and inequalities, bringing diverse perspectives into conversation with evidence at local and national scales, to explore complex or contentious social issues that impact policy, support the articulation of social attitudes and make a difference to society. Alongside this, the Centre is a national leader in methodological developments, particularly the use of online methods - and provides fresh thinking on how deliberative research can respond to big societal questions now and in the future.    This includes experimental work such as our ground-breaking online Deliberative Polls on post-Brexit policy making and participating in the Rethinking Public Dialogue programme to explore how deliberation might be scaled through creating rapid and accessible formats. 

With a background in academia and civil society, Ceri previously led the University of Brighton’s Community Knowledge Exchange (2008-2018) and completed her doctorate exploring knowledge and power in participatory research on issues of social justice. She is a volunteer at Sussex Nightstop (a small charity developing community-based responses to homelessness), an associate editor of Research For All and an advisory board member of the Citizens Convention on UK Democracy.

Suzanne is a highly skilled qualitative researcher with 20 years of public policy research experience. She led the qualitative research team at Ipsos MORI, an independent research agency, from 2013, and in that role was responsible for skills development, growing the business and embedding new and innovative approaches to solving policy problems with a focus on deliberative, participatory, ethnographic and digital methodologies.