This white paper outlines a long-term scientific vision for the development of digital-democracy technology. We contend that if digital democracy is to meet the ambition of enabling a participatory renewal in our societies, then a comprehensive multi-methods research effort is required that could, over the years, support its development in a democratically principled, empirically and computationally informed way.
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). The workshop brought together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic for a week-long workshop to discuss digital democracy, social networks, algorithmic fairness, social influence, argumentation, and collective intelligence. The workshop was sponsored by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS).
