Francesco Veri

I am a political scientist at the Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau at the University of Zurich working on democratic governance, political behaviour, digital democracy and democratic innovation.

My research focuses particularly on deliberative democracy, political participation, political behaviour, and the emerging relationship between artificial intelligence and democracy. A central theme of my work is how democratic institutions can improve citizens’ reasoning, inclusion, and participation, and how new technologies can support—or undermine—these processes.

Research

My current research is organised around four connected areas:

• Artificial intelligence and democracy — the opportunities and risks created by LLMs and AI-mediated deliberation, including AI facilitation, multi-agent deliberation, and human–AI democratic systems.
• Deliberative democracy and democratic innovations — how citizens deliberate, reason, and form political judgements in minipublics and other participatory institutions.
• Political behaviour and participation — how citizens engage with democratic institutions and how political attitudes and preferences develop.
• Democratic inclusion and representation — how democratic processes represent different perspectives, discourses, and forms of political reasoning.

My work combines experimental and observational quantitative methods with comparative research and set-theoretic approaches.

Current work

I am currently involved in research on:

• AI-supported and AI-mediated democratic deliberation
• the design and evaluation of citizens’ assemblies and minipublics
• deliberative reasoning and discourse representation
• political participation and democratic resilience
• methods for benchmarking LLM reasoning against human judgement

You can find more information about my work in the Publications, Research, Teaching, and CV sections of this website.