​The OECD's Public Governance Directorate, in collaboration with the Bertelsmann Stiftung, has released Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Citizen Participation, a report examining how AI tools can support and strengthen participatory and deliberative processes. Drawing on 50 real-world use cases across 22 countries, the report offers a typology of nine AI applications, from sense-making and translation to facilitation and moderation, that help governments and practitioners navigate an emerging and fast-moving field. It pairs this practical framework with a clear-eyed analysis of the risks, including exclusion, loss of nuance, and overreliance, and it insists throughout that AI should support rather than replace skilled facilitators and genuine citizen engagement. For the dialogue and deliberation community, the report is a timely resource for thinking rigorously about where technology can deepen participation and where human judgment must remain at the center of democratic practice.

The Trust for Civic Life, a grantmaking collaborative sponsored by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, has released its second annual community survey report, The Local Advantage: How Community-Based Efforts Build the Trust and Agency America Needs, drawing on responses from over 1,000 rural community members across 24 communities. The report finds that trust in national institutions continues to decline, while trust in local institutions, particularly libraries, nonprofits, and community foundations, remains consistently strong, and that people feel the greatest sense of agency when they take on leadership roles within organizations working to solve concrete community problems. The findings also point to widespread informal bridge-building, with nearly half of respondents reporting they have taken some action to connect across political or social differences. These insights offer dialogue and deliberation practitioners concrete evidence that locally rooted, action-oriented organizing is what sustains civic trust and participation. The report reinforces NCDD's mission by demonstrating, with new data, why investment in local dialogue and collaborative problem-solving remains central to a healthy democracy.

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg has released its tenth annual Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era? — a comprehensive empirical assessment of democratic health across more than 200 countries, finding that global democracy levels have fallen to their lowest point since the late 1970s and that nearly three-quarters of the world's population now lives under autocratic rule. Authored by Marina Nord, Ana Good God, and Staffan I. Lindberg, the report documents that democratic backsliding has spread beyond fragile states to affect established democracies in Europe and North America, with freedom of expression showing the most severe global decline and deterioration in rule of law and institutional checks appearing across a growing number of countries. V-Dem's framework is distinctive in explicitly measuring deliberative and participatory dimensions of democracy alongside electoral ones, making this report especially relevant to dialogue and deliberation practitioners working to strengthen civic culture. The report directly contextualizes NCDD's mission by documenting the scale of the democratic challenge the field exists to address.

Scaling Democratic Innovations: Features of Effective Catalyst Organisations & Future Frontiers, a new research paper from DemocracyNext authored by Claudia Chwalisz and Sammy McKinney, examines the organizations that intentionally drive the expansion of citizens' assemblies and deliberative practices in their regions — distilling six features of effective scaling catalysts, analyzing the tensions and trade-offs they navigate, and identifying five frontiers for future practice. The paper surfaces two critical challenges facing the field: coordination in increasingly crowded democratic innovation ecosystems and the precariousness of short-term, project-based funding, which undermines the long-term relationships and infrastructure work that scaling requires. For funders, it calls for five- to ten-year grants supporting ecosystem building; for practitioners, it offers a framework for understanding what makes scaling work and where the field is headed. This research directly advances NCDD's mission by providing the dialogue and deliberation community with rigorous, actionable insights into how deliberative democracy spreads, what sustains it, and what investments the field most urgently needs.

FIDE North America has released a Theory of Change for Citizens' Assemblies — a collaboratively developed field framework built with input from 18 organizations and more than 80 contributors, incorporating over 200 public comments and workshopped at Democracy R&D in Brussels and the National Conference on Citizenship in Washington. The document identifies three core problems that citizens' assemblies address — limited electoral accountability, unrepresentative decision-making, and government inability to resolve contentious issues — and traces outcomes across seven vectors, from individual empowerment and inclusion to policy impact and resilient democratic infrastructure, with explicit attention to the risks and enabling conditions for each. Framed as a living document that will evolve with the field, it provides practitioners with design guidance, funders with a clearer picture of plausible impact, and researchers with structured hypotheses to test. This release directly advances NCDD's mission by equipping the dialogue and deliberation field with shared standards, common language, and an honest account of what citizens' assemblies can and cannot accomplish.

The SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue recognized two undergraduate researchers at Simon Fraser University's 2026 Undergraduate Research Symposium for work that advances dialogue methods and democratic participation in concrete, community-oriented ways. Caitlin Chow received the Award for Research that Utilizes Dialogue Methods for her contributions to the Healthy Children, Healthy Communities project, which centers children's own voices and drawings to understand how the climate crisis affects their mental health and how that understanding can shape more responsive programming. Guneet Kaur received the Award for Research that Advances Democracy for her study of inclusivity in Vancouver public spaces, connecting equitable urban design to the democratic right of all residents to shape and inhabit their shared cities. Both projects model a research orientation that NCDD's network champions — grounded in lived experience, committed to equity, and oriented toward transformative community impact.

A May 2026 research article from Carnegie California by nonresident scholar Dr. Micah Weinberg examines the genuine democratic possibilities of AI-augmented deliberation — and the governance infrastructure that does not yet exist to realize them responsibly. Drawing on deliberative theory and real-world cases, including the UK's AI Safety Summit consultation and Fort Collins, Colorado's civic engagement process, Weinberg argues that AI synthesis tools can meaningfully address the long-standing tension between scale and quality in deliberative processes, expanding participation while preserving minority voices. However, he identifies a structural governance gap: democratic institutions currently lack the staffing, procurement standards, audit capacity, and legal frameworks to ensure that AI-augmented deliberation serves democratic rather than commercial imperatives, and a near-total standards vacuum leaves deliberative AI effectively ungoverned. The article calls for investment in democratic governance infrastructure — standard-setting, institutional capacity-building, and open-source platform development — as the decisive near-term priority, arguing that the question is not whether AI-augmented deliberation will become a fixture of governance, but whose interests it will serve and whose voices it will faithfully carry.

The Year in Deliberation 2025, published by Democracy R&D — the largest global network dedicated to deliberative democracy, with members across 58 countries — offers a comprehensive annual state-of-the-field report examining the most significant trends, cases, and challenges shaping citizens' assemblies and deliberative practice worldwide. The report explores five practitioner-identified trends, including the role of AI in deliberation, the connection between deliberative processes and democratic resilience, expanding representation across marginalized communities, deliberation beyond government contexts, and the sustainability of funding in an era of cuts. Grounded in 13 expert interviews and 16 field-advancing case studies — including a landmark U.S. example in Fort Collins, Colorado — the report offers both analytical depth and actionable insight for practitioners navigating a rapidly evolving field. This publication directly serves NCDD's mission by providing the dialogue and deliberation community with an authoritative, globally informed resource for understanding where the field stands and what it must do next.

Harmony Labs, a media research organization, has released a series of findings from its multi-year partnership with Democracy 2076, examining how entertainment media shapes Americans' beliefs about government and democratic participation. Drawing on behavioral data from more than 300,000 opt-in panelists and content analysis of thousands of streaming programs, the research finds that 58% of scripted streaming content Americans watch daily is government-relevant — and that stories set in schools, workplaces, and community organizations can be as civically formative as those set in government itself. The lab has also released the Democracy Audience Map, a free values-based segmentation tool identifying eight distinct ways Americans relate to democratic institutions, offering civic communicators and practitioners a data-grounded framework for audience strategy. This research enriches NCDD's mission by equipping dialogue and deliberation practitioners with evidence-based insights about the media landscape in which civic engagement — and disengagement — is being shaped.

The Center for Inclusive Democracy (CID), founded and directed by Mindy Romero, Ph.D., will launch as an independent national organization on July 1, 2026, transitioning away from its previous university affiliations to operate with greater focus and decisiveness at a moment when the integrity of nonpartisan democracy research requires institutional independence. With Sierra Health Foundation serving as its new fiscal sponsor, CID will continue producing rigorous, data-driven research on voter participation, electoral access, and civic engagement while expanding into new educational outreach programs, customized community data tools, and deeper direct engagement with community partners across the country. The organization's sixteen-year track record — informing the work of election officials, policymakers, and civic organizations at the state and national level — has earned it broad recognition as a trusted, nonpartisan resource in the democracy field. CID's commitment to closing the gap between democratic ideals and lived civic experience aligns directly with NCDD's mission to strengthen inclusive participation and ensure that dialogue and deliberation are accessible to all communities.