Richards Serving as Co-Investigator on Participedia Phase 2

Assistant Professor Dr. Robert C. Richards, Jr. is a co-investigator on Participedia Phase 2, a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, which studies how citizens participate in governance around the world.

As part of his work as co-investigator, Richards and the Clinton School of Public Service are recipients of a grant that will fund a graduate research position. Funding from the project enables one Clinton School student per year to work as a research assistant on projects investigating participatory governance and online citizen engagement. Previous Clinton School students who have served as research assistants on the Participedia project since 2018 include John Nsaman (’19), Bailey Fohr (’20), Maria Calderon (’22), and Aaron Kennard (’22).

The principal investigator for Participedia Phase 2 is Dr. Bonny Ibhawoh of McMaster University. The project team includes 63 researchers from 22 universities and 21 organizations across 12 countries.

In addition to participatory governance, the project involves research in the areas of human rights, democratic accountability and representation, democracy across borders, and digital democracy. Dr. Richards’s work on the project addresses participatory governance and digital democracy, and involves his research on online citizens’ assemblies, conducted with Dr. Chul Hyun Park and a number of Clinton School students. Future research for the project includes developing best practices for hybrid online and face-to-face public deliberations. Starting this fall, Participedia research at the Clinton School will be conducted as part of the work of the new Open Governance Lab, co-directed by Dr. Park and Dr. Richards.

Dr. Richards also integrates Participedia into his communication course, in an assignment in which students write case studies of participatory-governance events or processes, and have those case studies published in the Participedia database of participatory-governance events. Since 2018, Clinton School students have contributed 93 original case studies to the Participedia database.

Dr. Richards began working on the Participedia Project as a graduate student, and became a co-investigator on Phase 1 of the project in 2018. He has co-authored two refereed journal articles reporting results of analyses of data from the Participedia database.

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