Advancing Digital Democratic Innovation

Introduction

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.

Project Leadership

The project will be led by four well-known researchers with expertise in:

• Participatory platform design
• Deliberative democracy
• Computational social choice

Methodological Pillars

ADDI will be organised around three methodological pillars:

1. Technology
2. Empirics
3. Theory

Core Objectives

The project 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
• Understanding the structure of the preferences collected through digitally augmented instances of civic participation and deliberation

Technology Track

The technology track will lead the creation of interventions in the form of open-source platforms designed to digitally augment deliberation and participation.

Empirical Track

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.

Theoretical Track

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.

Conclusion

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.