Editorial
Editor's Note: This article is part of a four-part series mapping the emerging experiments worldwide that could reshape capitalism and democracy for the AI era. You find find Part 1 here.
Today's representative democracy model is visibly straining under AI-era induced pressures. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, political manipulation such as Cambridge Analytica and the politicization of the media all seem to be making society more polarized and less deliberative. We have, in effect, trapped our politicians in the attention economy and are now asking why they focus on emotive slogans rather than analyzing solutions to our collective problems.
This is leading to many innovators to ask: can we make democracy more open, participatory and deliberative using new tools?
Around the world, cities and nations have begun to experiment with digital platforms, sortition-based councils and novel voting methods to deepen citizen engagement and counteract increasingly erratic centralized power. In this article we are going to take a look at some of these innovations in governance.
Digital Democracy: Grassroots, Not Astroturf
Digital Governance With e-Estonia
We'll start off in Estonia, as nowhere has embraced digital governance on their scale, often leading it to be dubbed "e-Estonia." Every Estonian has a secure e-ID card enabling access to virtually all government services online. You can vote, pay taxes, sign contracts, check medical records, all with a few clicks.
Crucially, the system is backed by blockchain-like data integrity and transparency (citizens can see who's accessed their info). This digital backbone builds trust and saves an estimated 2% of GDP in bureaucratic costs yearly. Estonia's e-voting, introduced in 2005, allows citizens to vote from anywhere in the world; in the 2019 election, 44% of votes were cast online.
The convenience is obvious, but the larger point is how a digital public infrastructure can empower citizens and streamline participation. In our AI future, having a trusted digital identity and platforms for continuous interaction, not just periodic voting, will be key to evolving our governance at scale.
Open-Source in Barcelona and Taipei
Cities like Barcelona and Taipei are using open-source technology to crowdsource policy. Barcelona, under Mayor Ada Colau, built Decidim ("We Decide" in Catalan), a free, open-source platform for citywide participatory democracy. Through Decidim, tens of thousands of citizens have proposed and debated ideas for the city's strategic plan and even allocated part of the budget.
For example, Barcelona's recent participatory budgeting process let residents decide how to spend €75 million, which is about 5% of the investment budget, on local projects. Citizens submitted proposals, nearly 10,000 ideas, discussed them on the platform and in assemblies and then voted on which parks, schools or services to fund.
Decidim provides transparency as every comment and vote is open, and subject to a degree of deliberation rarely seen in conventional politics.
The g0v Community in Taiwan
Meanwhile in Taiwan, the government tapped a civic tech community called g0v, pronounced "gov-zero," to create vTaiwan, an online consultation process that has tackled contentious issues from Uber regulation to online alcohol sales.
The magic ingredient is an AI-powered tool called Pol.is. Pol.is allows mass participation but cleverly avoids flame wars: people vote on each other's statements but cannot directly reply or dunk on each other. The system then maps out clusters of opinion and highlights consensus positions that bridge divides.
In the Uber case, hundreds of drivers, users and citizens converged on a surprising point of agreement: both sides supported a level playing field with fair regulations for ride-sharing, and that consensus informed the government's changes to law.
Taiwan's use of vTaiwan and Pol.is has been called "crowdLaw"; it's not direct democracy overruling legislators, but a new way to generate legitimacy and collective intelligence for policymaking. A government minister in Taiwan described it as a way to "hear from citizens at scale without the conversation devolving into chaos," thus improving trust.
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The Power Question at the Heart of Digital Democracy
Barcelona Tests Citizen-Owned Data
A big concern in any form of digital democracy is who owns the data and the platforms? Barcelona's "Decentralised Citizen-Owned Data Ecosystems" (DECODE) project tackled this by giving citizens tools to control their personal data. In one pilot, Barcelona integrated DECODE with Decidim, enabling residents to decide how to share data from social media and IoT sensors for the public good, under privacy rules they set.
The broader "digital commons" approach, championed by Barcelona's former CTO Francesca Bria, imagines cities building open-source, privacy-friendly alternatives to Big Tech platforms. By reclaiming digital infrastructure as a commons, cities aim to empower citizens rather than cede control to corporate "monarchs" of data. This is nascent, mostly at a pilot-stage, but it's potentially important if we want democracy to extend into the data-rich domain of smart cities and AI-driven services.
Sortition Makes a Comeback
Some democracies are turning to an ancient idea with a modern twist: selecting citizens by lottery to form deliberative councils. The logic is straightforward: random selection, technically called “sortition,” can create a group that is more diverse and representative than those who self-select or get elected with money and party structures.
Ostbelgien (East Belgium), the small German-speaking region of Belgium, has institutionalized a permanent Citizens' Council. Established in 2019, this body of 24 randomly chosen citizens serve 18-month terms, and its job is to pick topics of public concern and convene larger Citizens' Assemblies to discuss and propose solutions.
Crucially, the parliament of Ostbelgien agreed to formally respond to and debate the recommendations of these citizens' panels. In effect, it's a "third chamber" of the legislature, one comprised of ordinary people deliberating in depth (with expert input) on issues like climate policy or healthcare.
One-Off Citizens' Assemblies
The Ostbelgien model has inspired similar moves in France, the UK and elsewhere, where we've seen one-off Citizens' Assemblies on climate change or constitutional questions. The results so far are promising; given time and information, random citizens come up with sensible, nuanced recommendations, and are often bolder than politicians, yet surprisingly consensus driven. They don't fall prey to the partisan posturing we see in elected chambers.
The challenge is turning those recommendations into action, but at least in Ostbelgien there's a mechanism to feed them into the normal law-making process. In a future where AI might handle a lot of administration, we could see more use of sortition to handle the value judgments and community choices that tech can't decide.
Rethinking How Decisions Get Made
Colorado’s Experiment With Quadratic Voting
Beyond whom gets to make decisions, how we make decisions is ripe for innovation too. One intriguing concept is “Quadratic Voting” (QV), essentially a way to measure not just preference but intensity of preference.
In a normal vote, majority rules and intensity of preference isn't counted; 51% beats 49% no matter how passionate or lukewarm folks are. QV instead gives voters a budget of vote credits to spread among options, with the cost of each additional vote on an option increasing quadratically. In plain terms, if you care a little about every issue you sprinkle votes around cheaply, but if you care deeply about one issue you can spend a lot of credits to pile votes on it, at a steep cost. This allows a group to find outcomes that maximize overall satisfaction, not just majority rule.
Colorado's state legislature actually tried a version of QV in 2019 to prioritize bills for funding. Lawmakers anonymously allocated votes to their most valued proposals, which helped reveal which bills had broad but mild support versus a few with intense backing.
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The Case for Quadratic Funding
A related idea, “Quadratic Funding,” has been used in philanthropic and community grant programs. For instance, the website Gitcoin uses it to distribute matching funds to open-source software projects. The formula amplifies donations that come from many people (signaling broad support) more than those that come from a single wealthy donor. In essence, $1 each from 100 people unlocks way more matching funds than $100 from one person.
Imagine city budgets or national participatory budgeting using quadratic funding to decide, say, which local arts projects or neighborhood improvements get grants; it would encourage organizers to gather wide grassroots support, not just woo the rich or cater to the loudest activist base.
Democracy Gets a Systems Upgrade for the AI Era
From digital platforms to citizens' assemblies to funky math-based voting, these governance innovations seek to make democracy more deliberative and distributed, acting as an antidote to the centralizing tendency of today's AI. They aim to give citizens meaningful roles beyond being passive voters or data points, whether it's co-creating policies online, being randomly enlisted for civic duty or having more expressive voting power.
By doing so, they not only counter the "centralized influence" problem, where a few actors with big data could otherwise manipulate outcomes, but also inject fresh legitimacy into policymaking. A representative legislature might fear tackling a divisive issue, but a citizens' assembly could find a creative compromise that the public trusts because people like them crafted it.
We are essentially updating the software of democracy for the post-digital age, patching bugs, adding features and strengthening the security against manipulation for the challenges ahead.
Fighting Disinformation Becomes Core Democratic Infrastructure
In the kingdom of AI, information is power, but also a major vulnerability. We've seen how social media algorithms, political bots and deepfakes can undermine shared reality.
If liberal democracy is a marketplace of ideas, then protecting the integrity of information, the quality of news, the authenticity of content and the transparency of algorithms, is as crucial as protecting property rights was in the old economy. Around the world, a variety of actors are experimenting with ways to ensure trustworthy information reaches citizens and to blunt the effect of disinformation and propaganda. Think of this as innovation in our "epistemic infrastructure."
Taiwan's 'Humour Over Rumour'
Governments and civil society are getting more organized in fighting fake news. Taiwan, for example, after being barraged by hostile disinformation set up a nimble system dubbed "humour over rumour."
When a damaging false rumor emerges, say, about toilet paper shortages, within hours government agencies push out a meme or funny clarification on social media to debunk it. During COVID-19, Taiwan's approach prevented panic; one viral meme featured the Premier winking, saying "We only have one butt each, don't hoard toilet paper," which sharply cut panic-buying.
The UK's Counter Disinformation Cell
On the more institutional side, the UK government during the COVID pandemic quietly ran a Counter Disinformation Cell that received daily reports from social media companies and fact-checkers on trending falsehoods. The UK is also home to startups like Logically, which uses AI to monitor misinformation online at scale and provides analysis to governments and social media platforms. These are early attempts to institutionalize defenses against disinformation, akin to public health departments for the information ecosystem.
The EU's Digital Services Act
The big social media and search companies are the unwitting monarchs of our information realm, and they are now firmly in the crosshairs of regulators. Innovation here is coming via policy: the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), took effect in 2024, forces the largest platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks like disinformation.
Authenticity Label Requirements
Another idea gaining ground is requiring "source indications" or authenticity labels on AI-generated media. Adobe, Microsoft and BBC have been piloting cryptographic content signing, where a photo or video can carry a secure certificate of origin. Meanwhile, browser extensions and apps like NewsGuard or Botometer act as "nutritional labels" for news, flagging known misinformation sites or identifying if a Twitter account behaves like a bot.
Public Education Efforts
Some other innovations are decidedly low-tech, focusing on educating the public. Finland is often cited for its national push on media literacy; after facing Russian disinformation, Finland added curriculum in schools to teach students how to identify fake news, check sources and understand biases.
Other countries are copying this: Sweden and Taiwan have run nationwide media literacy ad campaigns. There's also a revival of public service journalism models.
AI-Manipulated Media Laws
It's notable that some jurisdictions are enacting laws specifically addressing AI-manipulated media. China now requires deepfake content to carry a clear label. California has an election law that makes it illegal to distribute deceptive deepfakes of candidates within 60 days of an election.
Broadly, the goal of all these information integrity efforts is to strengthen the immune system of the body politic. Open democracies depend on a shared baseline of reality and good-faith debate. If AI systems can produce infinite misinformation, we'll need human institutions, powered by AI, to counter it with infinite vigilance. Like the experiments in new economic models and governance which we've reviewed, these innovations in information integrity are about ensuring technology supports an open society, rather than undermine it.
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What These Democratic Experiments Mean for Business
- Governance Evolution: Expect pressure to adopt similar participatory models in corporate governance. Stakeholder councils and customer panels may become mandatory rather than optional.
- Public Affairs Strategy: Traditional lobbying will lose effectiveness as decision-making distributes. Organizations need to build genuine grassroots support rather than rely on elite influence.
- Data Sovereignty: The DECODE model suggests future requirements for user-controlled data. Companies should prepare for a world where data portability and user ownership are standard.
- Information Integrity: Expect a positive stance on “information ethics” to be increasingly valued by customers and a dwindling tolerance of “sneaky stuff.”
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