Designing a New Generation of AI-aided e-Participation Public Services

Abstract: The liberal conception of democracy differentiates between (a) its institutions, such as free elections, political competition parties, freedom of speech that underline the western political system; and (b) regulative ideals that justify and let this system work. When the same institutions are justified differently depending on the underlying regulative ideals, the relationship between them becomes problematic, invoking often such notions as ‘democratic deficit’ and ‘democratic crisis’. These in turn point at the presence of political polarization, lack of meaningful civic participation in politics, and eventually the undermined democratic legitimacy. The aim of liberal democracy is to find an institution that can aggregate individual preferences into collective choice as fairly and efficiently as possible ensuring that different persons are equal and have the same weight in the political community. The aggregation is typically done by using the majoritarian principles of voting to make decisions or pluralistically, when disparate society’s groups influence decisions according to their interest in passing or rejecting such decisions, for example, through position voting. However, neither the majoritarian nor position voting does not envisage changing the initial political preferences so they could account for the views of other persons before the vote. Conversely, a deliberative concept of democracy is based on an open and uncoerced discussion – a form of e-participation public service – that is capable to transform initial preferences and thus accommodate other views. We argue that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support a new type of e-participation services by using the algorithms specifically designed to alternate voting and discussion through the intertwined AI and human test actions and eventually aggregate political preferences in a more conciliatory manner. We propose that such preferences are semantically revealed with the help of AI through the Habermasian validity claims to normative rightness that serve as the discursively constructed argumentation vehicles. This logic could help better exploit AI benefits to overcome the ills of the social choice theory used in the liberal democratic model to count votes, improve user’s experience of interacting with technology and eventually make political decisions more democratic.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, e-Participation, Democratic Deliberation, Social Choice Theory, Validity Claims, Jurgen Habermas

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1006415

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