Research

Enabling the Digital Democratic Revival: A Research Program for Digital Democracy

This white paper outlines a long-term scientific vision for the development of digital-democracy technology. The paper is co-authored by an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers and arose from the Lorentz Center Workshop on Algorithmic Technology for Democracy (Leiden, October 2022).

Recommended citation: Grossi, D., Hahn, U., Mäs, M., Nitsche, A., Behrens, J., Boehmer, N., Janssens, N., ... & Van De Putte, F. (2024). Enabling the Digital Democratic Revival: A Research Program for Digital Democracy. arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.16863.
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Ranking Proposals on Online Deliberative Platforms: a Critical Review

This manuscript focuses on ranking methods for DDPs, i.e., the way plat- forms order proposals in a list when showing them to users. We, that is Frederik van de Putte and me, distinguish three ranking goals: voting, offline deliberation and online deliberation. We concentrate on ranking for online deliberation. Our contribution is threefold. First, we argue that a principled approach to ranking is nec- essary, in light of the democratic objectives of DDPs. Second, inspecting a representative sample of DDPs that are used in practice, we observe that the choice for a ranking method is often ad hoc. Third, we intro- duce three principles for the selection of ranking methods, and argue that one of them, namely maximising approval diversity, should be emphasised in ranking for online deliberation. We thus obtain a conceptual toolbox for platform designers, hosts and users to make and justify choices for a ranking method.

Disentangling Diversity: Two Dimensions of large-scale online deliberation

I distinguish two new dimensions of diversity that come up when designing large-scale online deliberations.