Digital democracy that scales

The Challenge

Our research project, PERYCLES, addresses the unrealized promise of digital democracy to deliver meaningful democratic participation. While citizens are often dissatisfied with the workings of representative democracy, they show a strong preference for more direct channels of participation. Digital democracy offers such a channel, but current technologies face significant challenges, including resilience against negative social dynamics and meeting democratic standards of inclusivity, equity, and safe participation.

Our aims

PERYCLES aims to develop the theoretical, empirical, and computational know-how to design, validate, and deploy digital democracy solutions that support citizens’ meaningful participation through large-scale deliberation. Our interdisciplinary approach integrates insights from political science, social psychology, sociology, and computer science, involving leading digital democracy software developers, civic participation partners, institutional partners, and academic experts from six universities.

Our approach

Our key objectives include developing evidence-based methodologies for evaluating digital participation software, creating open-source implementations of algorithms for digital democracy platforms, and translating our research into actionable policy recommendations and best practices. By achieving these objectives, PERYCLES will contribute to the growth of trustworthy digital democracy technology, fostering a digitally enhanced public sphere in Europe.

Together with other researchers from our community, we have proposed a research agenda on digital democracy. Perycles addresses important parts of this agenda.