Who Governs the Interface? Platform Design, Human–AI Interaction, and Democratic Authority in Civic Technologies
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in civic technologies that mediate communication between citizens and public institutions. Most legal and policy debates treat AI governance as a problem of automated decision-making: whether outputs are explainable, fair, reviewable or contestable. This article shifts attention upstream. It argues that civic platforms also exercise pre-decisional governance through interface architectures, ranking systems, moderation pathways and AI-supported clustering or summarisation. These mechanisms rarely decide a legal claim on their own, yet they determine which contributions become visible, comparable, aggregated and institutionally actionable. The article develops a conceptual framework for analysing this infrastructural layer of democratic authority. Methodologically, it uses an ideal-typical reconstruction of participatory platform workflows, informed by documented affordances of systems such as Decidim and Consul, rather than an empirical evaluation of a single deployment. The analysis connects platform governance and public-law accountability with the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act, the GDPR and the Council of Europe AI Convention. It proposes four governance principles: visibility-mechanism transparency, procedural traceability, contestability by design and institutional responsibility mapping. The article concludes that democratic legitimacy in AI-mediated civic environments depends not only on accountable decisions but on accountable infrastructures of participation.
Source: AI Law Politics
Author: Salvatore Stanizzi
Institutions: Magna Graecia University, London Business School
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: European Commission
Awards: G1272154363, G6818765231, G7381429477
OpenAlex ID: W7167618604