About the Author

John Gastil is a Professor in the Departments of Communication and Political Science at the University of Washington, where he specializes in political deliberation and group decision making. Prior to joining the University of Washington, he worked for three years at the University of New Mexico Institute for Public Policy, where he conducted public opinion survey research and convened citizen conferences. Gastil received his communication Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994 and his B.A. in political science from Swarthmore College in 1989.

Gastil is the co-editor, with Peter Levine, of The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century (Jossey-Bass, 2005). This book brings together the experiences of activists, non-profit organization leaders, and scholars to understand how the most promising and innovative methods of citizen deliberation can fit into existing political cultures and institutions. In 2000, he published By Popular Demand: Revitalizing Representative Democracy through Deliberative Elections (University of California). This book built on his previous work by showing how small group discussions can be integrated into the electoral process and public institutions. In 1993, Gastil published Democracy in Small Groups: Participation, Decision Making, and Communication (New Society Publishers), which clarified what it means for a group to be democratic and showed what obstacles groups face when trying to make decisions democratically. Gastil’s scholarly articles have appeared in Communication Theory, Harvard Law Review, Human Communication Research, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Politics, Policy Studies Journal, Political Communication, Small Group Research, and other journals.

For more information about John Gastil, visit the author’s homepage.