THE RESEARCH TEAM
Dr. Rikki Dean
Rikki is an Associate Professor in Politics and Co-Director of the Centre for Democratic Futures at the University of Southampton and Visiting Professor at the Democratic Innovations Research Unit at Goethe University Frankfurt.
In addition to PoPPiE, Rikki leads the Integrating Citizen Deliberation for Impact (i4i) Project, funded by the German, Polish and Belgian Science Foundations, and is a Co-Investigator on the INSPIRE project, which explores how to make participatory processes more inclusive, resilient and embedded, and is funded through the Horizon Europe Programme.
His research combines democratic theory, public administration theory and empirical social science to understand a range of topics relating to democratic governance, including developing a systemic conception of democracy; evaluating participatory governance projects; understanding the opportunities for democratic innovation represented by new digital technologies; and analysing political actors’ attitudes to democracy.
Dr. Paul Kindermann
Paul is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Politics at the University of Southampton as well as a Visiting Fellow at the European Institute at LSE.
His research is located at the intersection of political sociology and democratic theory, focusing on the transformation of political participation and representation in liberal democracies and its implications for the desirability and feasibility of institutional reforms. A political scientist and theorist by training, Paul has conducted extensive qualitative fieldwork in Europe as part of his doctoral research at LSE.
Additional research interests include public opinion formation in Western Europe, as well as mixed-methods approaches – particularly the integration of qualitative research with survey data. Paul also has a strong interest in the European Union; his first article on the role of democratic innovations in the EU has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy.
Further info on Paul’s research and background can be found on his personal website.
Mollie Ruler
Mollie is a PhD student in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Southampton. She is a member of Public Opinion Research Southampton and the Centre for Justice Studies and previously worked as Events Coordinator for the Groups Network and as Co-Manager of Group Lab at the University of Kent.
Mollie specialises in the politics of criminal justice reform. Her research focuses on understanding the persistence of the prison crisis and exploring ways to secure the public support and political will required for substantive, long-term solutions.
More broadly, Mollie’s academic interests lie at the intersection of law, social psychology, and criminal justice. She is particularly interested in how these disciplines can be integrated using quantitative methods to analyse resistance to prison reform and opposition to offender rehabilitation.
Mollie holds an MSc-R and a BSc in Psychology from the University of Kent.