Fostering Deliberative Democracy in the Digital Age: An Ai-Powered Platform for Enhanced Citizen Engagement in Legislative Processes
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In contemporary democracies, effective citizen engagement is crucial for ensuring that legislative processes accurately reflect the diverse needs and perspectives of the population. Traditional public consultation methods often encounter challenges such as low participation rates, limited accessibility, and difficulties in capturing nuanced public opinions. Concurrently, the rise of digital platforms has transformed citizen interactions, introducing both opportunities and obstacles, including misinformation, echo chambers, and polarized discourse. To address these issues, this research proposes an AI-powered platform designed to enhance citizen participation in legislative processes by facilitating informed and constructive public deliberations. Leveraging advanced natural language processing, argument mining, and machine learning, the platform offers realtime fallacy detection, argument enhancement, multi-persona AI facilitators, and consensus visualization. These features aim to improve the quality of public discourse, mitigate logical fallacies, and promote consensus-building among diverse citizen groups. Grounded in deliberative democracy theories, the platform also emphasizes ethical considerations such as bias prevention, inclusivity, and privacy protection, ensuring that AI interventions support democratic values without infringing on individual rights. By transforming online political discourse into meaningful dialogues, the platform seeks to provide policymakers with actionable insights and foster a more responsive and participatory governance structure. This research not only advances the integration of AI in democratic processes but also offers a framework for addressing the ethical and practical challenges that arise at the intersection of technology and governance, ultimately contributing to the evolution of digital democracy.
Authors: Simone Vagnoni, Monica Palmirani
Institution: University of Bologna
Language: English
Topic: Social Media and Politics
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4412537579