Rebuilding trust in politics and government in 2026
Join Carnegie UK on Tuesday 23 June at 10.30am for our webinar, ‘Rebuilding trust in politics and government in 2026‘, featuring Professor Oliver Escobar (University of Edinburgh), Miriam Levin (Demos) and Adam Lang (Carnegie UK).
Public confidence in democracy is declining, and many people feel that political systems are struggling to respond to the issues that matter most to them.
Evidence suggests that deliberative approaches to democracy can help address these challenges. When designed well, they can strengthen engagement, build trust and support better decision making.
In this webinar, we will share findings from two recent pieces of research:
Together, these offer insight into how deliberative approaches are currently understood across UK institutions, and how they could be embedded more systematically within decision making.
The session will explore what this means in practice for rebuilding trust in politics and government, and how these approaches could support democratic wellbeing across the UK.
Agenda
10.30am: Welcome from Adam Lang, Carnegie UK
10.40am: Presentation on Parliamentarians’ perspectives on deliberative democracy from Adam Lang, Carnegie UK
10.55am: Presentation on Blueprints for Democratic Wellbeing from Prof Oliver Escobar, University of Edinburgh
11.15am: Reflections from Miriam Levin, Demos
11.30am: Discussion and Q&A
11.50am: Closing remarks
Biographies
Miriam Levin is Director of Participatory Programmes at Demos. Miriam was previously Chief Executive of Engage Britain until their merger with Demos. Prior to that she was Engage Britain’s Programme Director and led their people-powered policymaking work on health and care, which knitted deliberative and participatory methods together to build policy from the grassroots up. She has also worked for the UK government as Head of Community Action, where she led the government’s first deliberative democracy programme, and was Head of Outreach at English Heritage.
Her postgraduate studies have taken in several disciplines from archaeology to museology, regeneration to urban design, some of which she still uses.
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Professor Oliver Escobar is the Chair of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation at the University of Edinburgh. He works on participatory and deliberative democracy, with a focus on public participation, policy innovation, the commons, political inequalities, and the governance of the future.
Oliver combines research and practice to develop social and democratic innovations across various policy and community contexts. He was Academic Lead on Democratic Innovation at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (2019-2023), and Co-director of CRITIQUE (Centre for Ethics and Critical Thought) between 2021-2023. He co-led the projects European Smart Urban Intermediaries (2017-2020), Distant Voices (2017-2020), and What Works Scotland (2014-2019), and currently co-leads on public engagement at Behavioural Research UK (2023-2028) and on political economy at the EU Horizon project INSPIRE – Intersectional Spaces of Participation (2024-2027). Oliver’s work has been shared in ninety publications and fifty courses for students and practitioners across the public sector and civil society.
Adam Lang is director of policy, insight and advocacy at Carnegie UK. Adam was previously the head of Nesta Scotland and head of policy and communications at Shelter Scotland.
Adam sat on the advisory board for data driven innovation at the University of Edinburgh for three years and was an SCVO trustee for six. Adam sits on the advisory board for the Scottish Health Equity Research Unit at the University of Strathclyde.