Make it make sense: the challenge of data analysis in global deliberation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Iñaki Goñi: “From climate change to emerging technologies to economic justice to space, global and transnational deliberation is on the rise. Global deliberative processes aim to bring citizen-centred governance to issues that no single nation can resolve alone. Running deliberative processes at this scale poses a unique set of challenges. How to select participants, make the forums accountable, impactful, fairly designed, and aware of power imbalances, are all crucial and open questions….

Massifying participation will be key to invigorating global deliberation. Assemblies will have a better chance of being seen as legitimate, fair, and publicly supported if they involve thousands or even millions of diverse participants. This raises an operational challenge: how to systematise political ideas from many people across the globe.

In a centralised global assembly, anything from 50 to 500 citizens from various countries engage in a single deliberation and produce recommendations or political actions by crossing languages and cultures. In a distributed assembly, multiple gatherings are convened locally that share a common but flexible methodology, allowing participants to discuss a common issue applied both to local and global contexts. Either way, a global deliberation process demands the organisation and synthesis of possibly thousands of ideas from diverse languages and cultures around the world.

How could we ever make sense of all that data to systematise citizens’ ideas and recommendations? Most people turn their heads to computational methods to help reduce complexity and identify patterns. First up, one technique for analysing text amounts to little more than simple counting, through which we can produce something like a frequency table or a wordcloud…(More)”.

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael Henry Tessler et al: “We asked whether an AI system based on large language models (LLMs) could successfully capture the underlying shared perspectives of a group of human discussants by writing a “group statement” that the discussants would collectively endorse. Inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, we designed the “Habermas Machine” to iteratively generate group statements that were based on the personal opinions and critiques from individual users, with the goal of maximizing group approval ratings. Through successive rounds of human data collection, we used supervised fine-tuning and reward modeling to progressively enhance the Habermas Machine’s ability to capture shared perspectives. To evaluate the efficacy of AI-mediated deliberation, we conducted a series of experiments with over 5000 participants from the United Kingdom. These experiments investigated the impact of AI mediation on finding common ground, how the views of discussants changed across the process, the balance between minority and majority perspectives in group statements, and potential biases present in those statements. Lastly, we used the Habermas Machine for a virtual citizens’ assembly, assessing its ability to support deliberation on controversial issues within a demographically representative sample of UK residents…(More)”.

Ensuring citizens’ assemblies land

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Graham Smith: “…the evidence shows that while the recommendations of assemblies are well considered and could help shape more robust policy, too often they fail to land. Why is this?

The simple answer is that so much time, resources and energy is spent on organising the assembly itself – ensuring the best possible experience for citizens – that the relationship with the local authority and its decision-making processes is neglected.

First, the question asked of the assembly does not always relate to a specific set of decisions about to be made by an authority. Is the relevant policy process open and ready for input? On a number of occasions assemblies have taken place just after a new policy or strategy has been agreed. Disastrous timing.

This does not mean assemblies should only be run when they are tied to a particular decision-making process. Sometimes it is important to open up a policy area with a broad question. And sometimes it makes sense to empower citizens to set the agenda and focus on the issues they find most compelling

The second element is the failure of authorities to prepare to receive recommendations from citizens.

One story is where the first a public official knew about an assembly was when its recommendations landed on their desk. They were not received in the best spirit.

Too often assemblies are commissioned by enthusiastic politicians and public officials who have not done the necessary work to ensure their colleagues are willing to give a considered response to the citizens’ recommendations. Too often an assembly will be organised by a department or ministry where the results require others in the authority to respond – but those other politicians and officials feel no connection to the process.

And too often, an assembly ends, and it is not clear who within the public authority has the responsibility to take the recommendations forward to ensure they are given a fair hearing across the authority.

For citizens’ assemblies to be effective requires political and administrative work well beyond just organising the assembly. If this is not done, it is not only a waste of resources, but it can do serious damage to democracy and trust as those citizens who have invested their time and energy into the process become disillusioned.

Those authorities where citizens’ assemblies have had meaningful impacts are those that have not only invested in the assembly, but also into preparing the authority to receive the recommendations. Often this has meant continuing support and resourcing for assembly members after the process. They are the best advocates for their work…(More)”


Leveraging AI for Democracy: Civic Innovation on the New Digital Playing Field

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Beth Kerley, Carl Miller, and Fernanda Campagnucci: “Like social media before them, new AI tools promise to change the game when it comes to civic engagement. These technologies offer bold new possibilities for investigative journalists, anticorruption advocates, and others working with limited resources to advance democratic norms.

Yet the transformation wrought by AI advances is far from guaranteed to work in democracy’s favor. Potential threats to democracy from AI have drawn wide attention. To better the odds for prodemocratic actors in a fluid technological environment, systematic thinking about how to make AI work for democracy is needed.

The essays in this report outline possible paths toward a prodemocratic vision for AI. An overview essay by Beth Kerley based on insights from an International Forum for Democratic Studies expert workshop reflects on the critical questions that confront organizations seeking to deploy AI tools. Fernanda Campagnucci, spotlighting the work of Open Knowledge Brasil to open up government data, explores how AI advances are creating new opportunities for citizens to scrutinize public information. Finally, Demos’s Carl Miller sheds light on how AI technologies that enable new forms of civic deliberation might change the way we think about democratic participation itself…(More)“.

Building Power, Safety, and Trust in Virtual Communities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Dina Darwish: “Virtual communities are a new frontier in the digital landscape. While these spaces are only in their infancy, it will not be long before they become a part of much of the population’s daily life. Before that becomes the case, it is important that we instill guidelines and parameters to ensure that those interacting with these digital spaces feel safe within them and are able to use them to their fullest capacity.

Building Power, Safety, and Trust in Virtual Communities examines how online groups help people learn and change the way they think. In this book, different people with different academic backgrounds, methods, and personal experience with virtual groups look at this question. Case studies are included to help exemplify these findings. Together, these chapters discuss how virtual communities are built in ways that thinkers, researchers, and practitioners can understand…(More)”.

Hopes over fears: Can democratic deliberation increase positive emotions concerning the future?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mikko Leino and Katariina Kulha: “Deliberative mini-publics have often been considered to be a potential way to promote future-oriented thinking. Still, thinking about the future can be hard as it can evoke negative emotions such as stress and anxiety. This article establishes why a more positive outlook towards the future can benefit long-term decision-making. Then, it explores whether and to what extent deliberative mini-publics can facilitate thinking about the future by moderating negative emotions and encouraging positive emotions. We analyzed an online mini-public held in the region of Satakunta, Finland, organized to involve the public in the drafting process of a regional plan extending until the year 2050. In addition to the standard practices related to mini-publics, the Citizens’ Assembly included an imaginary time travel exercise, Future Design, carried out with half of the participants. Our analysis makes use of both survey and qualitative data. We found that democratic deliberation can promote positive emotions, like hopefulness and compassion, and lessen negative emotions, such as fear and confusion, related to the future. There were, however, differences in how emotions developed in the various small groups. Interviews with participants shed further light onto how participants felt during the event and how their sentiments concerning the future changed…(More)”

Guidelines for Participatory and Inclusive AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guidelines by the Partnership on AI’s Global Task Force for Inclusive AI: “..The objective is to help practitioners navigate the common challenges that arise in the process of stakeholder engagement to ensure their efforts remain authentic and as equity-oriented as possible. The resource aims to support individuals’ efforts in aligning their work with the needs of the communities they wish to serve, while reducing the likelihood of harms and risks those communities may face due to the development and deployment of AI technologies.

The Guidelines are separated into three major parts:

  • Guidance & Guardrails Recommended best practices and guardrails for participatory stakeholder engagement strategies, including specific recommendations by common use cases for engaging with stakeholders as part of the AI development process
  • Emerging Resources: AI Tools for Participatory and Inclusive AI Overview of the latest AI-enabled tools proposed to support stakeholder engagement activities, including a discussion of their potential applications and risks
  • Additional Background Details about why we created this resource, the people who provided their expertise for the initial draft, and foundational concepts that serve as the basis for the Global Task Force’s recommendations and guidance…(More)”.

Global Citizen Deliberation on Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Connected by Data: “This report explores how global citizen deliberation, particularly drawing on the concept of a global citizens’ assembly, could and should shape the future of artificial intelligence. Drawing on an extended design lab of in-depth interviews and workshops that took place in mid-2024, it presents a series of options for bringing the voices of those affected by AI development and deployment into decision-making spaces, through processes that can deliver informed and inclusive dialogue… In this report we address how established and emerging sites of global AI development and governance can integrate citizen deliberation, setting out five template options for citizens’ assemblies on AI: deliberative review of AI summits and scientific reports; an independent global assembly on AI; a series of distributed dialogues organized across the globe; a technology-enabled collective intelligence process; and commissioning the inclusion of AI topics in other deliberative processes…(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence for the Internal Democracy of Political Parties

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Claudio Novelli et al: “The article argues that AI can enhance the measurement and implementation of democratic processes within political parties, known as Intra-Party Democracy (IPD). It identifies the limitations of traditional methods for measuring IPD, which often rely on formal parameters, self-reported data, and tools like surveys. Such limitations lead to partial data collection, rare updates, and significant resource demands. To address these issues, the article suggests that specific data management and Machine Learning techniques, such as natural language processing and sentiment analysis, can improve the measurement and practice of IPD…(More)”.

AI has a democracy problem. Citizens’ assemblies can help.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jack Stilgoe: “…With AI, beneath all the hype, some companies know that they have a democracy problem. OpenAI admitted as much when they funded a program of pilot projects for what they called “Democratic Inputs to AI.” There have been some interesting efforts to involve the public in rethinking cutting-edge AI. A collaboration between Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s competitors, and the Collective Intelligence Project asked 1000 Americans to help shape what they called “Collective Constitutional AI.” They were asked to vote on statements such as “the AI should not be toxic” and “AI should be interesting,” and they were given the option of adding their own statements (one of the stranger statements reads “AI should not spread Marxist communistic ideology”). Anthropic used these inputs to tweak its “Claude” Large Language Model, which, when tested against standard AI benchmarks, seemed to help mitigate the model’s biases.

In using the word “constitutional,” Anthropic admits that, in making AI systems, they are doing politics by other means. We should welcome the attempt to open up. But, ultimately, these companies are interested in questions of design, not regulation. They would like there to be a societal consensus, a set of human values to which they can “align” their systems. Politics is rarely that neat…(More)”.