participation
Assorted links for 1 October 2026
Seven links: a new complexity index finds Japan and China lead different halves of the AI-export supply chain, a 10-country survey finds most public servants already use AI while few trust their government's use of it, Uruguay's AI-readiness ranking, a Canadian policy magazine on AI flooding public consultations, Argentina and Delaware's competing proposals for AI legal personhood, a critical read of Ghana's AI strategy, and content-authenticity standards reaching consumer phones.
Non-Western governments warned the UN that pacing frontier AI can be gatekeeping
At the UN General Assembly's 81st session in September 2026, Pakistan, Nigeria, Argentina and other non-Western governments said proposals to pace frontier AI development for safety can function as gatekeeping favouring whichever countries already lead, while pressing their own proposals for a real hand in the rules.
Indonesia's welfare redesign lets people dispute what the state's records say they own
In one Indonesian district, more than 9,000 people used a new appeals channel to correct what the government's records said about them. That number counts errors found, not yet errors fixed.
Using AI to write public comments improves every comment without closing the education gap
A survey experiment on US rulemaking found that ChatGPT made public comments easier to write and much better rated, without making people understand the rule any better. Agencies are now using the same models to read the comments.
Consultation is the cheap rung
The obvious objection to an 81,000-person AI consultation is representativeness. It is the weaker objection, and my own research is why.
Calling it grassroots does not make it grassroots
I find it slightly odd that 'no data center in my backyard' is now routinely described as grassroots activism.
Edgar Morin has died at 104
Edgar Morin has died at 104. He spent a career reviving Montaigne's preference for a well-made head over a well-filled one, and our education systems are still built for the second.
The logic of lines, from Florence to the digital queue
Having spent my younger life in Florence, I always had an interest in the logic of lines. At first, and like most tourists, I treated queues as outsourced discernment: after all, so many strangers could not all be wrong.
Open budgets, and what AI changes about what we can see
Open budgets and open data may not be at their fashionable peak, but AI changes what we can see in the data, and what we cannot.
AI and democracy keeps ignoring the generalist
It still amazes me how little attention those working at the intersection of AI and democracy pay to the role of generative AI in collective action.
Worth engaging with, and worth the harder questions
Worth engaging with, and worth asking the harder questions about. This is the kind of build the small-models argument has been waiting for.
Deliberative democracy's bottleneck is not scale, it is consequence
I have argued that deliberative democracy's constraint is not scale but consequence, and proposed coordination infrastructure that turns deliberative agreement into organised pressure. A new preprint reads like the dark mirror of that idea.
Verified humans, synthetic voices: where collective intelligence meets collective manipulation
The same infrastructure that could help democratic publics convert consensus into leverage can, with a different governance structure, manufacture the appearance of consensus where none exists.
The algorithmic hand: AI, democracy and collective action at scale
New paper out 'The Algorithmic Hand: Artificial Intelligence, Democracy, and Collective Action at Scale' Every few decades, a new technology promises to reinvent democracy.
What development research keeps missing about AI
A few thoughts as I join the Global Development Conference 2025 in Clermont-Ferrand, promoted by the Global Development Network.
New research: what digital participation actually changes
New in Government Information Quarterly, with Fredrik Sjoberg: who takes part in digital participation does not by itself determine who benefits. What decides it is whether, and how, governments respond.
Who participates in digital democracy, and who really benefits?
The dominant assumption is that who participates determines who benefits. Across participatory budgeting in Brazil, FixMyStreet, Iceland's crowdsourced constitution and Change.org, that chain broke at some stage in every case.
On sortition, and what a lottery can legitimately decide
In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Sortition: 'The Limits of Representativeness in Citizens' Assemblies', on what a democratic minipublic can and cannot claim to represent.
Unwritten 2025
'We don't know where this technology is going' sounds thoughtful and feels responsible. Increasingly I am convinced it is neither, and that waiting is a decision that may cost us.
The link between open data and trust in government is weaker than we assumed
Two rounds of survey evidence suggesting the link between open data and institutional trust is weaker than open-government advocates assume, and in places runs the other way.
AI's effects on elections are largely overstated
Keegan McBride and colleagues in MIT Technology Review, on why AI's measured effect on elections is far smaller than the commentary suggests. A reminder to prefer the research on voting behaviour over the punditry.
Underestimated effects of AI on democracy, and a gloomy scenario
Bots writing to legislators got within 2 percent of the response rate humans did. The trouble starts when governments answer with bots of their own.
The hidden risks of AI: how linguistic diversity can make or break collective intelligence
Diverse groups solve problems better. Models trained mostly on English inherit a narrower collective intelligence, and a subtler digital divide follows.