Enabling the Digital Democratic Revival: A Research Program for Digital Democracy

TL;DR

This white paper addresses how to revive democracy through digital tools by advocating a long-term, interdisciplinary research program that treats digital democracy as a socio-technical system. It proposes three methodological pillars—formal/computational modeling, behavioral experiments, and observational studies—and outlines six research challenges (equality, rule–user nexus, preference elicitation, representation, deliberation, identities) to guide the development of transparent, open, and fit-for-purpose digital platforms. By detailing state-of-the-art platforms, critical design challenges, and the gap between values and software, the paper argues for principled design aided by digital twins, axiomatic evaluation, and cross-method validation. The work aims to provide foundational, evidence-based tools and processes that can scale from local to trans-national governance, reducing distrust and increasing meaningful citizen influence on policy.

Abstract

This white paper outlines a long-term scientific vision for the development of digital-democracy technology. We contend that if digital democracy is to meet the ambition of enabling a participatory renewal in our societies, then a comprehensive multi-methods research effort is required that could, over the years, support its development in a democratically principled, empirically and computationally informed way. The paper is co-authored by an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers and arose from the Lorentz Center Workshop on ``Algorithmic Technology for Democracy'' (Leiden, October 2022).