André Bächtiger holds the Chair of Political Theory at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart. His research focuses on the challenges of mapping and measuring deliberation and political communication as well as understanding the preconditions and outcomes of high-quality deliberation in the contexts of both representative institutions and mini-publics. His research has been published by Cambridge University Press and in the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of Political Philosophy, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, European Political Science Review, Political Studies, and Acta Politica. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (with John S. Dryzek, Jane J. Mansbridge, and Mark E. Warren, forthcoming 2018, OUP),
John Parkinson is Professor of Politics, Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra. He is an applied democracy theorist who works on the relationships between formal law and policy making and the broader public sphere, crossing boundaries between normative political theory, interpretive political analysis, cultural theory, and public policy. His current research project compares the deliberative quality of two starkly contrasting cases: a campaign to recognize indigenous peoples in the Australian constitution, and the Scottish independence debate of 2012-2014, using novel electronic social science tools. A former editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science, his research has been published by Oxford University Press and in the British Journal of Political Science, Democratization, Public Administration, and Political Studies.