Theophile Penigaud de Mourgues

Theophile Penigaud de Mourgues is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Democratic Innovations program at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where he also led a multidisciplinary junior laboratory studying the mutations in democratic practices and theories (2018-2022).

His research area is democratic theory, with a special emphasis on democratic innovations such as citizens’ assemblies. His work focuses particularly on the French Convention for Climate (2019-2021) and the French Convention on End of Life (2022-2023) crossing qualitative and quantitative approaches. 

The key issues he is addressing include the causal relation between inclusive deliberation and sound political judgments – both at the individual and collective levels, the political role and legitimacy of sortition-based democratic innovations, and the conceptual links between justice, democracy, and substantive equality. 

He published numerous papers and a book in French, and articles in English in the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.