John Gastil

John Gastil, a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Public Policy Center for the 2024-25 school year, studies political deliberation and group decision making across a range of contexts. A distinguished professor of communication at Penn State in the Department of Arts and Sciences and in the Department of Political Science, he is a senior scholar at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy. His newest books are Hope for democracy: How citizens can bring reason back into politics (Oxford, 2020) with Katie Knobloch, and Legislature by lot: Transformative designs for deliberative governance (Verso, 2019) with Erik Olin Wright. Gastil also has written several other scholarly books and two novels. Dr. Gastil's current project is leading the Democracy Machine collaborative, a team of researchers and civic reformers aiming to improve platforms for deliberation online. His work on the Citizens’ Initiative Review has found that an electoral reform can improve the deliberative quality of elections on referenda and ballot initiatives. His Jury and Democracy Project investigated, and helped vindicate, the jury system as a valuable civic educational institution. His work with the Cultural Cognition Project demonstrates how our deeper values steer our information processing and opinion formation.

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