Alex is the democracy lead and senior researcher at mySociety. Within the democracy programme, he is responsible for coordinating the team and setting the direction of our democracy work. With his researcher hat, he works across full range of mySociety’s climate, transparency, community, and democracy programmes.

He has a combination political science (MSc in Democracy and Democratization) and technical background – leading on mySociety’s data science work.

His work has included looking at the state of FOI regulation across Europe,  investigating we can improve FOI legislation in the UK, creating new datasets of deprivation in the UK, discovering how local councillors feel about citizens’ assemblies, and digging through the history of people being annoyed by dog poo. He leads on mySociety’s response to consultations, and plays a role in shaping our future programme of work.

He has published peer-reviewed articles in Parliamentary Affairs and Local Government Studies, and contributed articles to the New Statesman’s CityMetric.

In the past he’s worked on renting campaigns, such as the campaign to end letting fees.

His nemesis is the white squirrel in the nearby park, who is really hard to take a photo of.

Alex is fluent in: Python, pandas (the statistics package), pandas (the animal), and the joys of democracy.