Javier Pérez González

Javier Pérez is redefining the relationship between civil society and the executive, legislative and judicial Powers of the State—shifting it from peripheral influence to a model of structured, sustained, and collaborative governance. Through Political Watch, he is building the civic architecture—tools, alliances, and norms—that enable civil society to move beyond fragmentation and reactive protest, and instead operate as a coordinated and strategic ally shaping public decisions from within.

Javier Pérez is reimagining how civil society participates in democracy—not as a fragmented observer, but as a coordinated, strategic force shaping public decisions. At a time when trust in institutions is crumbling and civic action is often dismissed as either irrelevant or reactive, Javier is building a new paradigm: one in which civil society becomes a co-architect of governance, equipped with the tools, alliances, and legitimacy to engage the Powers of the State on equal footing.

Through Political Watch, Javier is creating the civic infrastructure that allows organizations to act not only louder, but smarter. His approach goes beyond conventional civic tech models that focus on transparency for its own sake. In Spain, much of the data about political activity is technically public, but difficult to access, interpret, or use. Politicians check the box of transparency, but citizens and organizations are left with noise instead of insight. Javier flips that logic—designing systems where public information becomes usable, strategic, and shared.

What sets his work apart is that this transformation does not come from isolated civil society effort, it also reflects a mindset shift within public institutions themselves. Political Watch co-designs tools and participation mechanisms directly with government partners, helping them move beyond a minimalist idea of transparency toward a vision of governance that is open, responsive, and co-owned. By proving that citizen input can be rigorous, structured, and constructive, Javier is helping shift how institutions see their role—not just as advocates, but as enablers of collective democratic intelligence.

Javier´s innovation continues as Political Watch tackles a second barrier: the fragmentation of civil society. Too often, organizations work in silos, sending many isolated demands that overwhelm public authorities and undermine collective strength. Javier’s model creates structured spaces where actors from diverse fields—whether climate, education, or social justice—can co-create shared agendas and respond together to both long-standing and emerging challenges, such as shrinking civic space or the societal impact of AI. This shift from atomized advocacy to coordinated strategy not only amplifies civic voice—it also makes it easier for policymakers and other public authorities to understand, engage with, and act on civil society’s proposals.

What truly sets Javier apart is that he is not trying to “fix” participation through apps or one-off consultations. He is redesigning the relationship between civil society and the State. His work positions citizen-led intelligence, coordinated advocacy, and shared governance not as idealistic extras, but as structural pillars of democratic renewal. In doing so, he’s not just helping people raise their voices—he’s ensuring those voices are heard, understood, and capable of shaping the rules of the game.

A vibrant civil society is essential for a functioning democracy. It amplifies diverse voices, holds institutions accountable, and helps shape public agendas with equity and legitimacy. Yet in Spain—as in many democracies across Southern Europe and beyond—this civic muscle is faltering. Democratic formalities remain strong, but institutional responsiveness and accountability are increasingly fragile. Spain scores 9.58/10 in electoral pluralism, yet just 7.50/10 in the functioning of government, according to The Economist’s Democracy Index 2024. This gap reflects a democracy that is procedurally intact but substantively eroded: one where participation mechanisms often serve as bureaucratic gestures rather than pathways to influence.

In most countries, civil society actors struggle to influence policy in meaningful or sustained ways. Participation remains largely symbolic: over one-fourth of public consultations in Spain close without a single citizen contribution, and even fewer translate into policy impact. This procedural gap fosters public disenchantment. According to the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS, 2024), only 30.3% of Spaniards believe civil society organizations (CSOs) have a strong or moderate impact on decision-making. Moreover, among younger generations, 80% of Spanish youth under 30 feel that politicians do not listen to them—making Spain the second lowest among 26 countries surveyed in a global collaborative study led by the UN Youth Envoy (2022).

The perception reflects a broader crisis of efficacy: many CSOs lack access to responsive political channels, sustained advocacy tools, and the digital infrastructure required to shape public decisions, especially those working with marginalized groups. According to Oxfam Intermón’s CSOs’ needs (2024), 63% of CSOs in Spain report insufficient capacity to access and use public data for advocacy. Nearly 60% cite difficulties coordinating with peer organizations, and 50% identify a lack of stable institutional interlocutors as a barrier to civic impact.

This institutional void is not accidental; it is structural and historical. Spain’s civic sector emerged in the context of a centralized, paternalistic State and a long-standing culture of top-down policies. While democratic reforms post-dictatorship (1975 onwards) and movements like 15M (2011) expanded public mobilization, they lacked the infrastructure for long-term civic engagement. The political system evolved from a stable two-party structure to a fragmented multiparty system, generating volatility and legislative gridlock without delivering new mechanisms for collective civic influence. In this fragmented landscape, advocacy becomes reactive and siloed. Collective action struggles to find strategic footholds in policymaking.

The absence of coordination is compounded by stark power asymmetries in civic tech adoption. While a few large NGOs are equipped to use digital tools for data-driven advocacy, most community-led and issue-specific organizations are left behind. According to the Asociación Española de Fundaciones (2023), over 60% of Spanish CSOs cite inadequate digital skills as a key barrier to effective advocacy. This digital divide deepens inequality in political voice and exacerbates the exclusion of rural, youth-led, or underfunded actors.

These challenges are not unique to Spain. Across OECD countries, only 3 in 10 citizens believe their government will act on public consultation input—revealing a widespread crisis of civic confidence (OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions, 2024). In this context, the need for models that can organize civic coordination, build strategic infrastructure, and turn information into influence is more urgent than ever. Political Watch emerges not just as a Spanish response to democratic fatigue, but as a replicable blueprint for reimagining how civil society regains agency.

Javier Pérez’s strategy operates as a systemic architecture for civic activation—one that transforms how civil society, public institutions, and digital tools relate to one another in democratic life. It is not a platform, a tool, or a campaign—it is a framework for how to act strategically, collectively, and institutionally in the face of democratic dissatisfaction and civic fragmentation.

The strategy rests on three interconnected levers: civic infrastructure, collective advocacy, and institutional transformation. Together, they create a virtuous cycle: data becomes strategy, strategy becomes influence, and influence becomes new democratic norms.

1.From Access to Intelligence: Building Civic Infrastructure

Javier begins by addressing a foundational gap in civic influence: while political data may be legally public, it is rarely structured, contextualized, or accessible in ways that support advocacy. This disproportionately affects small and under-resourced civil society organizations, which often lack the time, tools, or capacity to make sense of complex legislative and institutional processes.

Political Watch develops civic technologies that democratize political intelligence, turning raw data into usable insight for advocacy and strategic decision-making. With tools like Qué Hacen los Diputados (What Members of Parliament Do, QHLD), users can track MPs’ behavior, monitor legislative trends, and identify accountability gaps across institutions and over time. What makes QHLD truly powerful is its civic intelligence: a collaborative tagging system co-designed with over 20 sectoral CSOs that enables thematic and historical analysis of political commitments. It transforms information into collective civic memory. Today, they have co-developed more than 6,000 tags across themes.

Political Watch also builds modular tools that can be tailored to specific advocacy goals. ColeSeguro, for example, was co-created with youth and education organizations to track more than €1 billion in COVID-19 emergency education funding. The tool’s success has since informed national-scale infrastructure, including Spain’s National Observatory of Child Care, that promotes, monitors and guides the progressive transition from institutional care of vulnerable children to family- and community-based alternatives. These tools allow grassroots organizations to access the kind of intelligence typically reserved for think tanks or institutional lobbies—equipping them to act with rigor, credibility, and strategic coherence. Given their adaptable and open-source essence, these civic-tech tools have already been adapted and applied in international contexts, including Paraguay, Andorra, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Moldova, Slovakia, and Slovenia—demonstrating the model’s relevance and flexibility across diverse democratic environments.

To consolidate and scale this methodology, Javier is launching the CivicTech Lab in 2025: a national hub for co-developing and distributing civic technologies. Designed as an open innovation space, the Lab will bring together technologists, grassroots organizers, and advocacy networks to co-create rights-based, citizen-centered tools that strengthen democratic infrastructure. It will serve as both an incubator for digital innovation and a learning node for replication across territories—with strong potential for adaptation in Latin America, where Political Watch already collaborates with leading actors in the regional CivicTech ecosystem through international networks such as Code for All, (largest international network of civic technologists, with members in over 60 countries).

2. From Data to Collective Action: Unlocking Strategic Civic Power

Javier knows that data alone does not shift systems. His second lever focuses on enabling civil society to act collectively and strategically—with shared goals, evidence-based messages, and coordinated pressure.

Through alliances like Polétika, Political Watch has helped over 500 organizations—from Greenpeace to small youth platforms—coordinate their advocacy during electoral and legislative cycles. Rather than flooding decision-makers with competing demands, Polétika fosters shared civic agendas: proposals co-created by diverse actors, consolidated into unified messages, and delivered with the weight of collective legitimacy. This not only strengthens civil society’s voice—it also makes it easier for institutions to engage meaningfully. The model’s success has enabled its replication in Burkina Faso, Peru, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.

Reflecting its global relevance, Political Watch has been selected to join the Steering Committee of the Global Democracy Coalition—a network of over 140 organizations across 46 countries working to promote and protect democracy worldwide, active in more than 110 nations.
In parallel, the organization has also been chosen to represent civil society in the design and organization of the next Global Summit of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), playing a key role in shaping global open governance agendas.

To support these alliances, Javier invests in multi-level capacity building:

- Training civic leaders and activists from over 100 organizations in data-driven advocacy. These sessions cover data extraction (e.g., budgets, MP behavior), visual storytelling, and multi-actor campaign design. From youth advocacy to housing access NGOs, have adopted these practices into their strategic planning—resulting in stronger institutional negotiations and media presence. Political Watch has designed a strategy to scale this type of training to over 900 organizations from underfunded or rural groups.

- Academic bridges for long-term civic leadership: Since 2015, Javier co-directs a graduate program on political advocacy at Universidad Pontificia Comillas, with over 200 alumni now embedded in governments, media, and movements. Since 2025, Javier is part of the faculty of Spain's first postgraduate program in Public Affairs and Artificial Intelligence, where he will teach algorithmic transparency and civic data governance—positioning Political Watch as a reference in democratic tech ethics.

- Bringing public officials into the ecosystem: In collaboration with the National Institute of Public Administration (INAP) and the Madrid regional government, Political Watch runs training sessions where public servants—technical staff, communicators, and policymakers—learn how transparency, accountability and public participation is ‘seen and experienced from outside’. These sessions foster institutional empathy, shared language, and a new culture of responsive policy design.

3. From Voice to Rulemaking: Embedding Civic Participation Across Government

The final pillar of Javier’s strategy focuses on transforming the structural relationship between civil society and public institutions. While open data and civic alliances generate visibility and voice, Javier knows that for change to be durable, it must be embedded in the rules, practices, and cultures of governance itself. His approach moves beyond demanding access, it redefines how power is shared, decisions are made, and accountability is sustained.

At the heart of this work is Ampliando Democracia (Amplifying Democracy), a cross-sectoral platform convened by Political Watch to organize civil society input into national policy reform. In 2023–2024, the platform united 38 CSOs and 44 independent experts to co-create Spain’s First Open Parliament Plan a landmark, cross-party agreement built with the contributions of PSOE, PP and Sumar and finally approved in 2025. The plan institutionalizes new democratic standards: Mandatory public agendas for lawmakers, lobby registries to track influence and ensure transparency, plain-language mandates to make legislation accessible and participatory agenda-setting processes to elevate citizen input. These measures represent more than procedural reforms—they reset the operating norms of the Spanish legislature. And critically, they were not imposed by the government but co-designed through civil society leadership.

Ampliando Democracia's strategy unlocked deeper engagement: its core proposals were fully integrated into Spain’s 5th Open State Plan and Political Watch received €360,000 in public funding to provide the government with advice and technical support. This is allowing Political Watch to embed participatory norms across ministries, advance democratic quality at the national level and implement democratic innovations with strategic actors within the public administration. To ensure continuity, Javier is leading the constitution of a new Alliance for Open State and Democratic Quality in Spain. This alliance brings together the leading Spanish platforms in transparency, public affairs and participation, to which organizations such as Amnesty International, Access Info Europe or the Spanish chapter of Transparency International belong. This coalition is designed not just to protect past gains, but to drive forward a new architecture of participatory governance, grounded in cross-sector accountability and strategic coherence.

Through this institutional pillar, Javier ensures that civic influence is not episodic, but embedded, visible, and iterative. Policy reform has become a site of co-creation—not just lobbying. Public institutions become learning spaces—not just gatekeepers. And civil society, long relegated to the role of watchdog, becomes a full co-author of the democratic script.

Javier Pérez’s personal and professional journey is rooted in a rare blend of privilege, humility, and coherence. Born into a modest household in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas, Madrid, Javier grew up surrounded by vibrant community life and strong ethical grounding. His family made the conscious decision to live in this environment, despite having the means to reside elsewhere, out of a deep commitment to social justice and everyday solidarity. It was a choice that would shape his life’s work.

While his neighborhood offered grounded values, his home exposed him to global ideas. His father, a university professor in engineering, brought the family to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a formative year—a moment that expanded Javier’s worldview and gave him early access to academic excellence and elite environments. But instead of intimidation, he internalized something different: that proximity to power or brilliance should not create reverence, but responsibility. It was also during this time that he lost his fear of authority and learned to engage with systems on an equal footing.

The seed of civic commitment was planted early. At age 11, Javier witnessed one of Spain’s largest grassroots mobilizations: the 0.7% movement, which demanded greater international aid. Watching ordinary citizens, including clergy, go on hunger strike for global justice left a deep impression. He understood then that courage does not require status—only purpose and community.

As a student, Javier co-founded LED, a laboratory to engage students in social and political development, launching his first experiment in collaborative social entrepreneurship. This commitment deepened during his seven years at Oxfam Intermón, where he served as research coordinator on issues like climate justice and fair trade. There, he gained an inside view of how global civil society works, and why it often falls short. For someone entrepreneurial and systems-minded like Javier, the bureaucracy of large NGOs proved limiting. He saw firsthand that without critical mass and strategic coherence, even the most compelling causes fail to move institutions.

His turning point came in 2011, when philanthropist David Soler approached him—not with a finished project, but with a blank page. Soler initially proposed financing a political party to influence Spanish development policy. Instead, through dialogue with Javier, that ambition evolved into a deeper question: what if we created a civic platform, not a partisan one, something that could bring data, civil society, and democracy into conversation? From that exchange, Political Watch was born. The timing was key. Spain had just experienced the 15M movement, a wave of mass mobilization demanding transparency and democratic renewal. The political system had cracked open, but no infrastructure had emerged to help civil society shape the new landscape. Javier’s initiative filled that gap, offering tools, alliances, and strategies to turn discontent into democratic power. Today, Javier’s work has contributed to Spanish’s civil society regaining momentum to leverage change through collective action. His story is not only about technical innovation, it is about the ethical conviction that democracy must be built from the ground up, again and again, and that civil society deserves not just a voice, but a seat at the table of power.