Yale University Citizens' Assembly on Institutional Voice
Join us as we bring diverse voices together to deliberate on institutional voice in higher education.
What is a Citizens' Assembly?
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Deliberative Democracy
Democratic innovation enabling thoughtful public engagement
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Diverse Representation
Randomly selected participants representative of the larger community
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Informed Decision-Making
Expert testimony and facilitated discussion leading to mutual understanding
Citizens' Assemblies (CAs) bring together randomly selected individuals in a community to decide on important issues. In a university context, this means that students are randomly selected to learn, deliberate, and formulate well-informed final products to share with the university community.
Our Mission
Innovating Democracy
Establish Yale as a leader in organizing Citizens' Assemblies - bringing students into meaningful, structured dialogue on complex issues and testing new models of democratic participation.
Impactful Research
Leverage Yale's strengths as a research institution to study how deliberative processes work and generate insights that inform democratic practice beyond campus.
Policy Through Process
Share recommendations and engage with university decision-makers to make deliberation matter in shaping university policy.
Institutionalizing Deliberation
Aspire to make Citizens' Assemblies a recurring and lasting part of campus life - an institutional space for reflection, dialogue, and decision-making at Yale for years to come.
We aim to inspire a tradition of Citizens' Assemblies at Yale—recurring, student-centered forums for inclusive, respectful, and evidence-based deliberation on pressing public issues. By bringing together diverse groups of students to engage across differences, these assemblies seek to foster a culture of civic dialogue, inform university decision-making, and generate insights into the broader promise of deliberative democracy. Our long-term vision is to make Yale a national leader in democratic innovation—where thoughtful conversation and collective reasoning are not occasional events, but a core part of university life.
Yale University's Inaugural Citizens' Assembly, Spring 2025
Understanding Institutional Voice
Against the backdrop of heavy campus protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict, Yale’s President, Maurie McInnis, announced the creation of a Committee on Institutional Voice in September of 2024. The committee was composed of distinguished professors who worked to produce recommendations to the administration on the topic of institutional voice (McInnis, 2024). This comes after Ivy League counterparts such as Harvard University had adopted policies of institutional restriction, increasing pressure on Yale to take a stand. On October 30, the Committee released its report (Della Rocca et al., 2024) and President McInnis accepted its recommendations (McInnis, 2024b), which was perceived as broadly adhering to principles of institutional neutrality.
Well-known Citizens Assemblies have been conducted on deeply sensitive issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage in Ireland (Suiter & Farrell, 2019) as well as assisted dying in France (Participedia, 2024). Additionally, less well-known CAs have taken place on smaller scales on local or organizational levels, including on university campuses (Kennedy & Pek, 2023).
In the current context of high student engagement on institutional voice, we believe this moment provides a rare opportunity to investigate the impact of CAs on the perceived legitimacy of policy decision-making processes in general, and university policy decision-making processes in particular. Our research team will study how the Citizens’ Assembly influences participants' opinions on institutional voice. It will also compare how the assembly’s recommendations are viewed in relation to the recommendations made by the Committee on Institutional Voice. This research will enhance our understanding of how deliberation affects opinions and decision-making. It will contribute to the broader field of democratic theory and the study of Citizens’ Assemblies in university settings.
Participant Selection Process
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Recruitment
Invited 2500 randomly-selected Yale College students to participate in the Citizens’ Assembly, set to run March 29 and April 5. Closed recruitment after receiving 110 signups. Recruitment form also collected consent from potential participants and informed them about the experiment and the compensation for participants.
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Random Assignment
10 sign-ups were assigned “alternate” status, to guard against potential dropouts from the assembly. The other 100 sign-ups were randomly split into two groups demographically-balanced by gender and race. One group of 50 was assigned to treatment (participating in the Citizen’s Assembly) and one group of 50 was assigned to control (not participating in the Citizen’s Assembly but paid to complete the same surveys completed by participants).
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Confirmation & Onboarding
Participants selected to participate in the assembly receive orientation packets to prepare for the assembly and its topic.
This approach ensures our assembly represents Yale's diverse community while minimizing selection bias.
Event Schedule
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Day 1
Morning
Check-in, Welcome, Small Group Sessions
Afternoon
Expert Panel, Small Group Sessions, Large Group Deliberation
Closing
Closing Survey, Group Photo
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Day 2
Morning
Check-in, Welcome Back, Small Group Deliberation, Presentations
Afternoon
Small Group Sessions, Large Group Feedback, Proposal Consolidation, Final Proposals
Late Afternoon
Amendment Process, Voting, Closing Discussion, Survey and Photo
From Recommendations to Reality
Formal Documentation
All assembly recommendations, voting results, and minority positions will be included in a comprehensive final report.
Insights into the theory and practice of organizing a Citizens' Assembly—especially within a university setting—will also be shared on this website and through our research outputs.
Presentation to Leadership
Assembly participants will present their findings to Yale’s leadership. While it will be up to participants to decide how to proceed after the assembly, they will have the option to speak with the media and organize an event to share their recommendations with the broader student body and university leadership.
Research Process & Outputs
Exploring Divisive Issues Through Deliberation
This study aims to investigate how decisions over divisive issues can be discussed in an open yet civil manner. Can Citizens' Assemblies (CAs) serve as a potential avenue to broaden decision-making to the ordinary populace? And does the broader population perceive CAs as more legitimate in light of their representative and deliberative qualities?
The research builds upon existing literature on CAs, comparing their perceived legitimacy to that of traditional decision-making bodies. It will also explore whether CAs can have a depolarizing effect, by comparing opinion changes of participants vs. non-participants.
Key Research Objectives
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Compare Opinion Changes
Replicate past experiments showing that deliberation produces substantial changes in opinion and depolarization, by comparing opinion changes in Assembly participants and non-participants.
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Qualitative Comparison
Undertake a qualitative direct comparison of the outputs of the CA and that of the Committee on Institutional Voice.
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Perceptions of Legitimacy
Survey the wider student body to compare perceptions of the Assembly to that of a committee of professors tasked to deliberate on the same issue.
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Evaluating Outputs
Conduct a survey that will ask students to compare the outputs of the two processes.
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Institutional Impact
Investigate whether knowledge of the Assembly’s outputs had any impact on the undergraduate community's views on institutional voice.
Meet the Organizers
Agnes Sjöblad
Agnes Sjöblad is a junior in Branford College studying political theory under the umbrella of the humanities. She is particularly interested in questions related to religion and politics, normative democratic theory, political epistemology, and the environmental humanities. Agnes’s recent summer internship at International Bridges to Justice in Geneva and role as a student liaison with the Greenberg World Fellows Program reflect her commitment to understanding how the democratic theories that she studies apply in practice. On campus, Agnes also leads orientation programs for international students and gives guided tours at the Yale Center for British Art.
Beata Fylkner
Beata Fylkner is a junior in Berkeley College majoring in Political Science. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics and political theory, with a focus on state formation, democratization, and institutional reform. At Yale, she conducts research with the Democratic Innovations student group at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and works as a research assistant. Originally from Sweden, she has a particular interest in the European Union and EU-Africa relations. She brings experience researching participatory methods and governmental accountability from her work at LM International and International IDEA. Beata is excited to explore new ways of doing democracy in collaboration with the broader Yale community.
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson is a junior at Yale University, majoring in Political Science with a certificate in French. She is from Atlanta, Georgia, a city that has inspired many of her policy interests. Katherine is passionate about serving underserved communities and is particularly interested in social justice, promoting quality education in communities of color, climate policy, and democratic innovation.
At Yale, Katherine serves on the board of the Generational African American Student Association. She was also selected as a Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies Director’s Fellow, studying domestic policy and a Yale Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era (MADE) fellow, examining how technology has transformed global human rights advocacy and responses to mass atrocities. In her free time, Katherine enjoys traveling, reading, and dancing.
Shao Lee
Shao Ming (a.k.a Shao) is a PhD student in political science at Yale University. His main interests lie in normative democratic theory and the history of political/democratic thought, as well as field experiments in democratic innovations (for more specific questions regarding his thesis, wait a few more years). He was a research assistant in Yale’s Affective Science and Culture Lab as well as the Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford University during his undergraduate years, and his work has been published in the Journal of Deliberative Democracy. Shao is a proud graduate of Yale-NUS College, Asia’s first liberal arts college, where he received a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics with a minor in Psychology.
Liam Richardson
Originally from Phoenix, AZ, Liam is a senior in Pierson College studying Statistics & Data Science with an interdisciplinary focus on political attitudes. Outside of the YYP, Liam is passionate about singing: currently, he sings with the Yale Glee Club, and he previously sang with the Whiffenpoofs and Spizzwinks(?). He also works for the Poorvu Writing Center and hosts a weekly radio show.
Governance Committee
Hélène Landemore
Hélène Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University with a specialization in political theory. Her research and teaching interests include, among other things, democratic theory, political epistemology, and the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence. She is also a fellow at the Ethics in AI Institute at the University of Oxford, and an advisor to the Democratic Inputs to AI program at OpenAI. She served on the Governance Committee of the most recent French Citizens' Convention and is currently undertaking work supported by Schmidt Futures through the AI2050 program.
Claire Priest
Claire Priest is the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor at Yale Law School, with a secondary appointment as Professor of History.
Professor Priest is the author of Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America (Princeton University Press, 2021, Series: Joel Mokyr, ed., The Princeton Economic History of the Western World).
Alice Siu
Siu received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, with a focus in political communication, deliberative democracy, and public opinion, and her B.A. degrees in Economics and Public Policy and M.A. degree in Political Science, also from Stanford.
Siu has advised policymakers and political leaders around the world, at various levels of government, including leaders in China, Brazil, and Argentina. Her research interests in deliberative democracy include what happens inside deliberation, such as examining the effects of socio-economic class in deliberation, the quality of deliberation, and the quality of arguments in deliberation.
Ethan Leib
Ethan J. Leib is Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. He teaches in contracts, legislation, and regulation. His most recent book, Friend v. Friend: Friendships and What, If Anything, the Law Should Do About Them, explores the costs and benefits of the legal recognition of and sensitivity to friendship; it was published by Oxford University Press. Leib's scholarly articles have recently appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, and elsewhere. He has also written for a broader audience in the New York Times, USA Today, Policy Review, Washington Post, New York Law Journal, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. Before joining Fordham, Leib was Professor of Law at the University of California–Hastings in San Francisco. He has served as a Law Clerk to then-Chief Judge John M. Walker, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and as a Litigation Associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York.
Alexander Guerrero
Alexander Guerrero is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His work in epistemology, political and moral philosophy, and legal philosophy has appeared in journals such as Philosophy and Public Affairs, Ethics, Legal Theory, and Philosophical Studies. He has a forthcoming book, Lottocracy: A New Kind of Democracy (Oxford University Press), in which he defends the idea that lotteries, not elections, should be used to select political officials. He is also the co-editor (with Elizbeth Harman) of the Norton Introduction to Ethics (forth
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Whether you're a student, faculty member, or community participant, your voice matters in this important conversation about the future of institutional neutrality at Yale. Join us in this experiment in democratic deliberation as we collectively navigate questions about the university's role in society.