| Project Detail |
Civic participation in digital technology to improve democracy Digital technology is often perceived as incompatible with effective democracy. The ERC-funded ADDI project will challenge this notion by exploring how digitally enhanced civic participation can strengthen democratic processes. Led by experts in participatory design, deliberative democracy, and computational social choice, the project will focus on three key areas: technology design, experimental testing, and preference understanding. It will develop tools to facilitate citizen deliberation, evaluate the impact of digital platforms in participatory forums through random trials, and analyse collected preferences, including those of underrepresented minorities. By creating open-source platforms and testing their effectiveness, ADDI aims to demonstrate how digital technologies can enhance civic engagement and make these capabilities globally accessible. The Advancing Digital Democratic Innovation (ADDI) project will pioneer the study of digitally augmented forms of civic participation for preference formation and elicitation. While digital technology has, for some time now, been widely seen as being in direct conflict with the needs of a well-functioning democracy, ADDI will realise the true potential of digital technologies in the democratic space. The project will be led by four well-known researchers with expertise in participatory platform design, deliberative democracy, and computational social choice. It will be organised around three methodological pillars - technology, empirics, and theory - and it will serve three core objectives: designing technologies and procedures for citizen deliberation and participation; experimentally testing the impact of digital platforms in deliberative and participatory forums; and understanding the structure of the preferences collected through digitally augmented instances of civic participation and deliberation. The technology track will lead the creation of interventions in the form of open-source platforms designed to digitally augment deliberation and participation. The empirical track will test these interventions using randomised trials in deliberative and participatory forums and will explore the statistical patterns of the preferences elicited in them. The theoretical track, finally, will contribute conceptual and algorithmic tools to elicit, present, and combine preferences in real-world environments, including situations where participants provide incomplete preferences and that involve under-represented minorities. At the end of the project, we will have charted the potential of digital technologies in supporting and improving democratic practices, while also providing a robust suite of scientifically validated open-source tools designed to distribute these capabilities at a global scale. |
