Matt Ryan
Biographic Data
| ID | 4122511 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matt Ryan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matt |
| FAMILY NAME | Ryan |
| SIGNATURE | RYAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8693-5063 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Get out to deliberate (Gotd): Door-to-door canvassing to improve civic engagement
Several decades of experimentation have found that ‘Get-Out-the-Vote’ (GOTV) campaigns can effectively increase voter turnout. Yet, little has been said about the ability of similar-style campaigns to encourage participation in other types of civic engagement, such as citizens’ assemblies, which require much higher levels of commitment. Furthermore, although studies have found general support for citizens’ assemblies, willingness to participate i…
Navigating the Dual-View Phenomenon: Social Ambivalence, Ambivalence Literacy, and Lecturer Role Transformation in AI-Integrated Transnational STEM Education
Generative AI chatbots are becoming routine study companions in STEM, which raises a pedagogical question: what do students expect human lecturers to do differently when AI support is ubiquitous? This study examines STEM undergraduates’ expectations for a transformation of the lecturer role and their social ambivalence toward AI chatbots in Sino-foreign transnational education (TNE) programmes in China. We administered an online survey to 467 con…
Learning to Deliberate Through Hybrid Role-Playing Games: Evidence from Participatory Budgeting Simulations
Hybrid role-playing games are increasingly used to support democratic learning, yet there is limited empirical evidence on how such hybrid designs function across contexts. This study analyses the pedagogical and deliberative effects of Empaville, a hybrid role-playing game designed to simulate a green participatory budgeting process by embedding deliberation, competition, and voting within a fictional urban setting. We analyse six implementation…
Potential and Pitfalls of Audio as Data for Political Research: Alignment, Features, and Classification Models
Political science is a field rich in multimodal information sources, from televised debates to parliamentary briefings. This paper bridges a gap between computer and political science in multimodal data analysis using audio. The adoption of multimodal analyses in political science (e.g., video/audio with text-as-data approaches) has been relatively slow due to unequal distribution of computational power and skills needed. We provide solutions to …
A class of their own: Parliamentarians Are Less Likely to Be Perceived as Working Class
In order to understand the relevance of class politics and the changing composition of our politicians, we must first understand how the public derive their views of social class and, importantly, that of their elected representatives. If the social class of representatives is to matter, the public must be able to at least partly accurately infer the social class of representatives. This article addresses that question through a large conjoint ex…
The impact of role-playing democratic innovation on civic education: The case of Empaville
This paper describes the evolution of the EMPAVILLE hybrid role-playing game simulation of Participatory Budgeting (PB), one of the most widely adopted democratic innovation, and examines its effects on participants based on classical performance indicators of deliberative practices. Using exit surveys and participant observation from 62 players across four game sessions the study explores how game design influences learning about PB, engagement …
Opening Up? Adoption of Open Science Practices in Democratic Innovation Research
Innovations in deliberative and participatory democracy have been rapidly adopted by policy makers. Long-term success of democratic reform hinges on developing research through open, reproducible, and ethical standards that secure trust in findings. This study examines how Democratic Innovations (DI) scholars implement open science practices (OSP). We analyze empirical research published in English-language peer-reviewed journals between 1970 and…
Success Denied: Social Class and Perceptions of Political Success
The working class are poorly represented in democratic institutions across the world, despite substantial evidence that the public do not discriminate against working‐class candidates and view them more positively across numerous character traits. We propose a novel explanation: a pragmatism bias where working‐class individuals are perceived as less likely to achieve political success. We provide experimental evidence that this bias may operate a…
Knowledge for the Commons: What is Needed Now
We set out a case for practice theory as a way to better understand and advance commoning, responding to calls for more communologies, that is, methodologies for the commons. Within the framing offered by practice theory, we argue for two potentially complementary ways of knowing: comparison and interpretation. These approaches and combinations of them are under-used in the field but are growing as additional ways of knowing that could inform bot…
Qualitative Comparative Analysis
This chapter explains how Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) can be used to compare different instances of deliberation. QCA is a method for establishing the configurations of conditions that are necessary or sufficient for an outcome. QCA uses learning from the mathematics of set theory to map and analyse the constellations of attributes of cases of a social phenomenon like democratic deliberation. In deliberative democracy research, QCA is …
Place-based Politics and Nested Deprivation in the U.K: Beyond Cities-towns, ‘Two Englands’ and the ‘Left Behind’
‘Place-based explanations’ of politics in the UK draw on survey data to tell sweeping narratives about ‘Two Englands’, or of sizeable regions of the country that have been ‘Left Behind’, reinforcing popular accounts of a North-South or city-town divide. We introduce the concept of nested deprivation—deprivation that may occur in just one housing estate or even one row of flats within neighbourhoods that are otherwise affluent. We report on intens…
Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails: A Comparative Analysis of Participatory Budgeting
When and how do ordinary citizens gain substantial control over important collective decisions affecting their lives? This book provides new answers to that question by systematically accumulating evidence in novel ways. This comparative review of participatory budgeting reveals the factors behind its success and failures in achieving democratic engagement. The book describes the application of Qualitative Comparative Analysis to systematically a…
Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails: A Comparative Analysis of Participatory Budgeting
Matt Ryan draws on ten years of research to deliver this landmark comparative review of participatory budgeting, or collective decisions on spending and taxation around the world. With examples of both positive change and notable failure, the book shows when and why citizens achieve this, and how policy makers can foster democratic engagement
Community Control in the Housing Commons: A Conceptual Typology
We advance theorizing on the governance of the commons through a configurative comparative analysis (CCA) of community control in the housing commons. We focus our analysis on community land trusts (CLTs), which are increasingly recognised as a potential governance mechanism for collective access to housing provision for low-income communities. Through systematic comparative analysis of CLTs in the US and UK, we extend the existing evidence base …
The credibility of regional policymaking: Insights from South America
Regional responses to international threats and opportunities have become prevalent. Yet significant lacunae persist in our recognition of some impacts of regional policies. Where measuring impact of regional policy does exist, this tends to focus on economic impact, heavily influenced by the EU model, or focuses on impacts that we have come to expect from national level policymaking. In this paper we show that important effects of regional polic…
The heat: Temperature, police behavior and the enforcement of law
Delivery of a western-centric initial teacher education award in a Chinese-centric context. What constitutes good practice
This paper has two purposes. First, to explore ways in which a western-centric in-service teacher education programme has transformed the teaching of 14 teacher participants who hitherto used a more Chinese-centric approach to teaching. Second, to investigate if any changes that have occurred have diffused beyond the teacher participants’ classrooms and if so, to whom and to where. The teacher participants belonged to one of four cohorts of teach…
How best to open up local democracy? A randomised experiment to encourage contested elections and greater representativeness in English parish councils
Interventions aimed at increasing the supply and representativeness of elected officials range from facilitative to the formally authorised. This paper reports on a field experiment aimed at testing the effect of facilitative approaches at the local level based on a collaboration between parish councils and the research team. We randomly allocated 818 parish council clerks across five counties in Southern England, either to receive information an…
Moving beyond input legitimacy: When do democratic innovations affect policy making
This article makes three key contributions to debates surrounding the effectiveness of democratic innovation, deliberation and participation in representative political systems. In the first instance, it argues that more attention should be paid to the role that participation actually plays in governance. The literature on democratic institutional design often neglects concern about the effects of innovative institutional designs on more traditio…
Comparing blunders in government
Much attention has been paid to government ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. National political and administrative systems have been frequently blamed for being disproportionately prone to generating mishaps. However, little systematic evidence exists on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. Based on a comparative perspective on blunders in government, this article suggests that constitutional f…
Testing Assumptions in Deliberative Democratic Design: A Preliminary Assessment of the Efficacy of the Participedia Data Archive as an Analytic Tool
At smaller social scales, deliberative democratic theory can be restated as an input-process-output model. We advance such a model to formulate hypotheses about how the context and design of a civic engagement process shape the deliberation that takes place therein, as well as the impact of the deliberation on participants and subsequent policymaking. To test those claims, we extract and code case studies from Participedia.net, a research platfor…
Using Cases in Political Science: Reflections on Keith Dowding’s The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science
This short response presses further on considerations about the N of cases and so-called qualitative and quantitative evidence in political research. I ask whether Dowding’s critique of the claims of causal process-tracing is relevant to case studies as they appear in real-life political science. I argue that choosing a case is an integral part of performing a case study and case studies in reality are always situated within research designs that…
The Failure to Examine Failures in Democratic Innovation
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096517000579
Improving Research Methods Teaching and Learning in Politics and International Relations: A ‘Reality Show’ Approach
Student dissatisfaction with undergraduate research methods courses in politics and international relations is common across the sector. We suggest that methods teaching suffers from an unhealthy disassociation between research in theory – which we call ‘method acting’ – and research in practice. Our critical interviews with eminent researchers expose the compromises professional researchers make when designing their research. Students appreciate…
Mid-Late Quaternary vegetation and climate change reconstructed from palynology of marine cores off southwestern New Zealand
Moving beyond input legitimacy: When do democratic innovations affect policy making
This article makes three key contributions to debates surrounding the effectiveness of democratic innovation, deliberation and participation in representative political systems. In the first instance, it argues that more attention should be paid to the role that participation actually plays in governance. The literature on democratic institutional design often neglects concern about the effects of innovative institutional designs on more traditio…
Comparing blunders in government
Much attention has been paid to government ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. National political and administrative systems have been frequently blamed for being disproportionately prone to generating mishaps. However, little systematic evidence exists on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. Based on a comparative perspective on blunders in government, this article suggests that constitutional f…
The Failure to Examine Failures in Democratic Innovation
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096517000579
Improving Research Methods Teaching and Learning in Politics and International Relations: A ‘Reality Show’ Approach
Student dissatisfaction with undergraduate research methods courses in politics and international relations is common across the sector. We suggest that methods teaching suffers from an unhealthy disassociation between research in theory – which we call ‘method acting’ – and research in practice. Our critical interviews with eminent researchers expose the compromises professional researchers make when designing their research. Students appreciate…
Place-based Politics and Nested Deprivation in the U.K: Beyond Cities-towns, ‘Two Englands’ and the ‘Left Behind’
‘Place-based explanations’ of politics in the UK draw on survey data to tell sweeping narratives about ‘Two Englands’, or of sizeable regions of the country that have been ‘Left Behind’, reinforcing popular accounts of a North-South or city-town divide. We introduce the concept of nested deprivation—deprivation that may occur in just one housing estate or even one row of flats within neighbourhoods that are otherwise affluent. We report on intens…
Hacia un análisis comparado de las innovaciones democráticas. Lecciones de un estudio de N pequeña sobre Presupuestos Participativos mediante fsQCA
Aunque el interés académico por las “innovaciones democráticas” ha proliferado, la mayoría de los análisis empíricos se apoyan en un solo caso de estudio. Se ha prestado poca atención al análisis comparativo de las innovaciones, en concreto de las condiciones en que emergen y se mantienen. Algunos estudios recientes sobre presupuestos participativos (PP) han comenzado a emplear análisis de casos cruzados en un intento por explicar los resultados …
The credibility of regional policymaking: Insights from South America
Regional responses to international threats and opportunities have become prevalent. Yet significant lacunae persist in our recognition of some impacts of regional policies. Where measuring impact of regional policy does exist, this tends to focus on economic impact, heavily influenced by the EU model, or focuses on impacts that we have come to expect from national level policymaking. In this paper we show that important effects of regional polic…
Community Control in the Housing Commons: A Conceptual Typology
We advance theorizing on the governance of the commons through a configurative comparative analysis (CCA) of community control in the housing commons. We focus our analysis on community land trusts (CLTs), which are increasingly recognised as a potential governance mechanism for collective access to housing provision for low-income communities. Through systematic comparative analysis of CLTs in the US and UK, we extend the existing evidence base …
How best to open up local democracy? A randomised experiment to encourage contested elections and greater representativeness in English parish councils
Interventions aimed at increasing the supply and representativeness of elected officials range from facilitative to the formally authorised. This paper reports on a field experiment aimed at testing the effect of facilitative approaches at the local level based on a collaboration between parish councils and the research team. We randomly allocated 818 parish council clerks across five counties in Southern England, either to receive information an…
Using Cases in Political Science: Reflections on Keith Dowding’s The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science
This short response presses further on considerations about the N of cases and so-called qualitative and quantitative evidence in political research. I ask whether Dowding’s critique of the claims of causal process-tracing is relevant to case studies as they appear in real-life political science. I argue that choosing a case is an integral part of performing a case study and case studies in reality are always situated within research designs that…
Seniority and anti-competitive restrictions on the legislative common pool: Tenure’s impact on the overall production of legislation and the concentration of political benefits
What Do Bettors Want? Determinants of Pari-Mutuel Betting Preference
This paper is an analysis of the demand for thoroughbred racetrack wagers, examining evidence that would support the existence of two types of bettors: the risk-averse informed bettor versus the uninformed bettor. Looking at 12 major racetracks over the fall of 2002, we undertake an empirical examination of the determinants of bettors' preferences for particular wagers on specific races. The goal is to try to determine what individual aspects of …
Mid-Late Quaternary vegetation and climate change reconstructed from palynology of marine cores off southwestern New Zealand
Seniority and anti-competitive restrictions on the legislative common pool: Tenure’s impact on the overall production of legislation and the concentration of political benefits
Hacia un análisis comparado de las innovaciones democráticas. Lecciones de un estudio de N pequeña sobre Presupuestos Participativos mediante fsQCA
Aunque el interés académico por las “innovaciones democráticas” ha proliferado, la mayoría de los análisis empíricos se apoyan en un solo caso de estudio. Se ha prestado poca atención al análisis comparativo de las innovaciones, en concreto de las condiciones en que emergen y se mantienen. Algunos estudios recientes sobre presupuestos participativos (PP) han comenzado a emplear análisis de casos cruzados en un intento por explicar los resultados …
Improving Research Methods Teaching and Learning in Politics and International Relations: A ‘Reality Show’ Approach
Student dissatisfaction with undergraduate research methods courses in politics and international relations is common across the sector. We suggest that methods teaching suffers from an unhealthy disassociation between research in theory – which we call ‘method acting’ – and research in practice. Our critical interviews with eminent researchers expose the compromises professional researchers make when designing their research. Students appreciate…
Testing Assumptions in Deliberative Democratic Design: A Preliminary Assessment of the Efficacy of the Participedia Data Archive as an Analytic Tool
At smaller social scales, deliberative democratic theory can be restated as an input-process-output model. We advance such a model to formulate hypotheses about how the context and design of a civic engagement process shape the deliberation that takes place therein, as well as the impact of the deliberation on participants and subsequent policymaking. To test those claims, we extract and code case studies from Participedia.net, a research platfor…
Using Cases in Political Science: Reflections on Keith Dowding’s The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science
This short response presses further on considerations about the N of cases and so-called qualitative and quantitative evidence in political research. I ask whether Dowding’s critique of the claims of causal process-tracing is relevant to case studies as they appear in real-life political science. I argue that choosing a case is an integral part of performing a case study and case studies in reality are always situated within research designs that…
The Failure to Examine Failures in Democratic Innovation
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096517000579
How best to open up local democracy? A randomised experiment to encourage contested elections and greater representativeness in English parish councils
Interventions aimed at increasing the supply and representativeness of elected officials range from facilitative to the formally authorised. This paper reports on a field experiment aimed at testing the effect of facilitative approaches at the local level based on a collaboration between parish councils and the research team. We randomly allocated 818 parish council clerks across five counties in Southern England, either to receive information an…
Moving beyond input legitimacy: When do democratic innovations affect policy making
This article makes three key contributions to debates surrounding the effectiveness of democratic innovation, deliberation and participation in representative political systems. In the first instance, it argues that more attention should be paid to the role that participation actually plays in governance. The literature on democratic institutional design often neglects concern about the effects of innovative institutional designs on more traditio…
Comparing blunders in government
Much attention has been paid to government ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. National political and administrative systems have been frequently blamed for being disproportionately prone to generating mishaps. However, little systematic evidence exists on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. Based on a comparative perspective on blunders in government, this article suggests that constitutional f…
The heat: Temperature, police behavior and the enforcement of law
Delivery of a western-centric initial teacher education award in a Chinese-centric context. What constitutes good practice
This paper has two purposes. First, to explore ways in which a western-centric in-service teacher education programme has transformed the teaching of 14 teacher participants who hitherto used a more Chinese-centric approach to teaching. Second, to investigate if any changes that have occurred have diffused beyond the teacher participants’ classrooms and if so, to whom and to where. The teacher participants belonged to one of four cohorts of teach…
Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails: A Comparative Analysis of Participatory Budgeting
When and how do ordinary citizens gain substantial control over important collective decisions affecting their lives? This book provides new answers to that question by systematically accumulating evidence in novel ways. This comparative review of participatory budgeting reveals the factors behind its success and failures in achieving democratic engagement. The book describes the application of Qualitative Comparative Analysis to systematically a…
Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails: A Comparative Analysis of Participatory Budgeting
Matt Ryan draws on ten years of research to deliver this landmark comparative review of participatory budgeting, or collective decisions on spending and taxation around the world. With examples of both positive change and notable failure, the book shows when and why citizens achieve this, and how policy makers can foster democratic engagement
Community Control in the Housing Commons: A Conceptual Typology
We advance theorizing on the governance of the commons through a configurative comparative analysis (CCA) of community control in the housing commons. We focus our analysis on community land trusts (CLTs), which are increasingly recognised as a potential governance mechanism for collective access to housing provision for low-income communities. Through systematic comparative analysis of CLTs in the US and UK, we extend the existing evidence base …
The credibility of regional policymaking: Insights from South America
Regional responses to international threats and opportunities have become prevalent. Yet significant lacunae persist in our recognition of some impacts of regional policies. Where measuring impact of regional policy does exist, this tends to focus on economic impact, heavily influenced by the EU model, or focuses on impacts that we have come to expect from national level policymaking. In this paper we show that important effects of regional polic…
Qualitative Comparative Analysis
This chapter explains how Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) can be used to compare different instances of deliberation. QCA is a method for establishing the configurations of conditions that are necessary or sufficient for an outcome. QCA uses learning from the mathematics of set theory to map and analyse the constellations of attributes of cases of a social phenomenon like democratic deliberation. In deliberative democracy research, QCA is …
Place-based Politics and Nested Deprivation in the U.K: Beyond Cities-towns, ‘Two Englands’ and the ‘Left Behind’
‘Place-based explanations’ of politics in the UK draw on survey data to tell sweeping narratives about ‘Two Englands’, or of sizeable regions of the country that have been ‘Left Behind’, reinforcing popular accounts of a North-South or city-town divide. We introduce the concept of nested deprivation—deprivation that may occur in just one housing estate or even one row of flats within neighbourhoods that are otherwise affluent. We report on intens…
Knowledge for the Commons: What is Needed Now
We set out a case for practice theory as a way to better understand and advance commoning, responding to calls for more communologies, that is, methodologies for the commons. Within the framing offered by practice theory, we argue for two potentially complementary ways of knowing: comparison and interpretation. These approaches and combinations of them are under-used in the field but are growing as additional ways of knowing that could inform bot…
The impact of role-playing democratic innovation on civic education: The case of Empaville
This paper describes the evolution of the EMPAVILLE hybrid role-playing game simulation of Participatory Budgeting (PB), one of the most widely adopted democratic innovation, and examines its effects on participants based on classical performance indicators of deliberative practices. Using exit surveys and participant observation from 62 players across four game sessions the study explores how game design influences learning about PB, engagement …
Opening Up? Adoption of Open Science Practices in Democratic Innovation Research
Innovations in deliberative and participatory democracy have been rapidly adopted by policy makers. Long-term success of democratic reform hinges on developing research through open, reproducible, and ethical standards that secure trust in findings. This study examines how Democratic Innovations (DI) scholars implement open science practices (OSP). We analyze empirical research published in English-language peer-reviewed journals between 1970 and…
Success Denied: Social Class and Perceptions of Political Success
The working class are poorly represented in democratic institutions across the world, despite substantial evidence that the public do not discriminate against working‐class candidates and view them more positively across numerous character traits. We propose a novel explanation: a pragmatism bias where working‐class individuals are perceived as less likely to achieve political success. We provide experimental evidence that this bias may operate a…
Get out to deliberate (Gotd): Door-to-door canvassing to improve civic engagement
Several decades of experimentation have found that ‘Get-Out-the-Vote’ (GOTV) campaigns can effectively increase voter turnout. Yet, little has been said about the ability of similar-style campaigns to encourage participation in other types of civic engagement, such as citizens’ assemblies, which require much higher levels of commitment. Furthermore, although studies have found general support for citizens’ assemblies, willingness to participate i…
Navigating the Dual-View Phenomenon: Social Ambivalence, Ambivalence Literacy, and Lecturer Role Transformation in AI-Integrated Transnational STEM Education
Generative AI chatbots are becoming routine study companions in STEM, which raises a pedagogical question: what do students expect human lecturers to do differently when AI support is ubiquitous? This study examines STEM undergraduates’ expectations for a transformation of the lecturer role and their social ambivalence toward AI chatbots in Sino-foreign transnational education (TNE) programmes in China. We administered an online survey to 467 con…
Political science (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Democracy (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Citizen journalism (6 works)