I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University St. Gallen specializing in the study of civic participation, political communication, and comparative politics.

I completed my dissertation “Combining sortition and direct democracy: Designing the role of minipublics in the Swiss democratic system” in June 2023 as part of the project “A non-populist theory of direct democracy”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Geneva. The thesis focuses on democratic innovation, proposing and testing ways to further improve Swiss direct democracy. I investigated how explanatory statements about referendum issues written by citizens’ assemblies facilitate understanding among uninvolved citizens and increase their knowledge and voting preferences. This research involved carefully designed real-world experiments with citizens’ assemblies in Switzerland.