Can Digital Tech Actually Help Save Democracy?

Democracy and the digital world seem to go together like oil and water. Many associate digital tools like social media with partisan polarization, hateful political rhetoric, and bots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI) chat interfaces that filter or even replace interactions with our fellow citizens.

But can digital technology be used to the benefit of democracy?

My team at the UC Riverside Laboratory for Technology, Communication and Democracy (TeCD-Lab), believe so. We have developed a platform called Prytaneum—named for the civic center of Ancient Greek city-states—that seeks to use AI and algorithmic tools to enhance the democratic process.

But for digital technology to help improve the democratic process, we need a fuller understanding of what democracy should do, and how modern technology is impeding that process.

Deliberation, Social Media, and the Future of Democracy

The business model for today’s tech companies is to maximize engagement. But that often means tailoring social media algorithms to make people angry or feed them information—true or false—that confirms their prior beliefs.

Those design features might result in lots of engagement—and therefore advertising revenue—but they also undermine how democracy should ideally work.

Democratic theorists have long advanced the idea of deliberative democracy—in which community members deliberate political issues together to reach an agreed upon course of action—as key to facilitating widespread civic engagement and bringing government policy in line with the priorities of the electorate.

There are good reasons to believe that the way social media facilitates engagement with politics acts contrary to this objective. After all, when people are angry and polarized, they don’t discuss politics with people of different backgrounds or belief systems, a prerequisite for deliberative democracy. Instead, they retreat to their echo chambers, and it’s harder to craft consensus that makes people on all sides feel like their voices are being heard.

It’s important to note that this vision of deliberative democracy doesn’t just mean having discussions between different sections of the community—it also means deliberation between and among officials and the public. Beyond social media, modern webinar platforms are designed to enable a speaker to communicate to a large audience, but they essentially disempower the audience from being able to speak back to the presenter. But democratic discussion ought to go both ways.

Back to Basics

To improve democratic processes in the age of social media and webinar platforms, we need to leverage the insights of modern democratic theory, the ancient wisdom of democratic practice, and cutting-edge technological advances.

With the TeCD-Lab’s webinar platform, Prytaneum, we’re attempting to recreate the deliberative town hall process of Ancient Athens through modern technology that can enable more and better deliberation at a modern scale.

Prytaneum is showing that using democratic theory to shape technological design can enable us to get people out of their echo chambers, to speak across differences, and to engage fruitfully and respectfully with their fellow citizens.

Prytaneum enables deliberation at the scale of modern democracy. The speaker still gets to speak, but now audience members can all share their perspectives simultaneously, without necessarily having to interrupt the speaker. They can input their feedback into the platform while the speaker is speaking. Their responses are then curated and compiled by the AI in a summary that allows the speaker—and everyone else—to understand the diverse and nuanced perspectives within a large audience.

That encourages feedback and debate, not just between speaker and audience, but also among the audience. That facilitates better understanding of each other’s perspectives and breaks people out of their digital echo chambers.

How AI Enables Deliberation

Deliberative democracy requires a facilitator to ensure that all perspectives are heard and that people stay on topic. We’ve designed Prytaneum to do that facilitation, compiling audience members’ input to boost engagement and produce relevant insights on the diversity of public opinion.

By illuminating the diverse perspectives among audience members, Prytaneum helps participants understand the reasons for and against all of the different options that are on the table. We’ve designed the AI to catalogue all the perspectives, outline the reasons given for each, and then to summarize these perspectives following the conversation.

That’s important because part of the problem with the traditional town hall is the diversity of perspectives. Here in Riverside, California, you might have 100 homeowners show up to take part in a local housing hearing, but only three renters. That’s common because homeowners are wealthy and have time to spare, whereas a renter might be busy working two jobs. Because of that, there tends to be a dominant perspective.

But with Prytaneum, if all the homeowners say the same thing, even though there are 100 of them, they’re just giving one perspective that the AI will create a summary of. And if all the renters say the same thing, that’s one perspective too.

Prytaneum summarizes and gives both views, without one being presented as dominant. And if there are other people at the meeting going off topic—another common occurrence at town halls—those perspectives are filtered out, which in turn creates incentives for participants to stay engaged and deliver impactful remarks, lest they be ignored.

Of course, some will quibble with this approach. We’re not polling with Prytaneum, but outlining the various perspectives without favor so that people can consider each one and reach an informed conclusion. We can’t capture perspectives not in the virtual room. And we don’t mean to impede people’s right to be disruptive and to yell at their representatives, as they do at traditional town halls.

Prytaneum is but one of many tools to increase civic engagement. Others—from traditional town halls to online forums—still need to be a part of the equation. We’re just adding something new.

The Future of the Democratic Public Square

Digital technology and the scale of modern society have created problems for democracy. But by using a mix of modern technology and deliberative democratic theory, we can enable greater engagement between the public and their representatives.

We hope that Prytaneum, as it becomes used by more and more public officials, will become another tool in the toolkit to help citizens get engaged in politics and allow representatives to get a better view of what their constituents actually think.

Kevin Esterling is a professor of public policy and political science and the director of the TeCD-Lab at UC Riverside.

Thumbnail credit: Adam Fagen (Flickr)