Graham Wetherall-Grujić of the Innovation in Politics Institute about improving political discourse

Welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovator Podcast and our guest of today is Graeme Wedderol-Gruitch.

Thank you for your time.

Hi Alex, yeah, thank you very much for the invitation.

And as a first question, I would like to ask you something about your background and also maybe what are you researching on?

Yeah, sure.

Maybe to start with what I'm doing right now.

So I'm a senior researcher at the Innovation and Politics Institute, where I specialize in the intersection between technology and democracy, which includes things like uh digital

citizens participation, but also questions like open data, electronic voting, the way that AI is used by governments.

So there's a whole range of ways in which tech and democracy are interacting and it's expanding very rapidly.

And part of my job at the moment is to kind of keep an overview of that.

um As to my background, um I spent a long time in the academic world, um first studying political theory.

um Actually at a time I would say where interest in

democracy wasn't very strong in that field.

think there was a consensus that um democracy as we knew it at the time was relatively stable and there were people calling for more radical forms of democracy, but I would say

there was more of a sense of complacency around the issue than there is today.

I then went on to study uh and teach philosophy.

I was very interested in the kind of background questions behind the political theory.

and really getting to the bottom of the problem um and spent some time involved in some very, very theoretical um conversations and engaging with these questions.

Then around about four years ago, I left the academic world and got this job at the Innovation and Politics Institute, um which was very eye-opening for me because it was a

big leap from

the theoretical world into a very practical world.

I joined the team initially as an editor where I was writing up uh reports and articles on best practices and democratic innovation from around Europe.

But I was also talking to the people who were really running these projects in cities all around Europe.

So some of them were mayors, some of them were people working for administrations or NGOs.

um But all of them were taking a very hands-on approach to democracy, which was very exciting for me.

And, I mean, what is democracy?

I mean, it's a word that we always talk about, democracy.

oh This is a big question.

I think in some ways, to say, as I said, I've spent the last few years interviewing people who really are doing the hands on work and I have a lot of respect for them.

And I think you can spend much too long talking about theories and not getting on with the practice of this stuff.

I have the highest level of respect for people who are out there.

working in communities to really improve the acceptance of democracy among the public because it's such uh an issue at the moment.

Having said that, think having some kind of theoretical framework in view is useful.

And sometimes I think there is a little bit of a lack of that.

think, especially in the tech world, there can be a tendency to confuse democracy just with choice, just with the idea that

we should be giving the public a choice.

There's also a tendency to conflate it sometimes with um collective intelligence.

I think that's a very important strand of what democracy can be and what it can do, but I don't think it's sufficient as a definition of democracy.

I suppose I would go back to the roots and the roots of the word and say that it's about giving power to m

people and it's about government uh by the people and for the people.

um And if you look at what is going on in the United States today, but also in Europe today, I think you can see how that is uh floundering in various respects.

First of all, because people feel

disconnected from politics, they don't feel that they have any power.

But second, and I don't think we talk about this enough, um governments don't have as much power as they used to have either.

So the governments that we're putting, the people we're putting out there to represent us, um don't feel empowered to make decisions on a big range of important questions.

And a lot of political power is being shifted to, for example,

big tech um who are taking more and more decisions on the behalf of everybody um who have an awful lot of influence in shaping the legislation around these technologies.

um And so, yeah, I think keeping in mind uh this question of power and making sure that we're not saying we need to give people more and more choice.

Actually, that's a word I associate a little bit with the neoliberal paradigm.

uh But making sure that that choice actually has an impact um is a real problem.

And I think one of the frustrations people have with democracy right now is that sense that

They are being given perhaps new mechanisms for choice, but the footprint of those choices is vanishingly small.

And I'm thinking about how to give power to the people, like maybe using some, I don't know, civic tech software or platform.

And also what is power?

That is another big question.

that's a huge question.

um Perhaps while I think about that one, to start with the first question, mean, a lot of my work over the last few years has been to study different uh digital platforms for

participation.

um And so um whether you think about things like participatory budgets that cities are running, or you think about large scale

consultation processes.

So, uh and I mean, we should consider the offline ones as well, things like mini publics, citizens assemblies.

Some of these have semi successfully migrated online.

There's also consultation platforms like Polis, uh which was used extensively during the VTaiwan movement, which is still going.

which grew out of the sunflower demonstrations em as a new way of structuring conversations between citizens.

em And perhaps the Taiwan example is an interesting one.

It was used to resolve a dispute when Uber first started deploying em drivers in Taiwan.

And it was used to resolve a dispute between the taxi drivers and

the Uber drivers and the local population.

And it provided a way of structuring a conversation that's very, different from social media ranking algorithms, which encourage conflict and um is really based on an algorithm

that helps build consensus um among people.

m hopefully that gives some way to answering the first part of the question.

Yeah, yeah, no, I was thinking about uh because as an example I was reflecting I was thinking about the power ah Because the Italian is potere and It's like also something as

a potential the potentiality of doing something and uh

Yes.

I really like this because it means that we have power also if we are not presidents, also if we are not the king of a country, but we have a lot of power.

Yeah, yeah.

I think there are two edges to that.

one of what I like that very much, and I didn't know that it's the same word that had this, the potency, right, would be the English equivalent, but this idea of potential.

um One of the things I think that's gone wrong, actually, is that people feel that potential impact on politics is very, very narrow right now.

um

And that for a long time, there's been a consensus on a broad range of issues.

If you think about what's going in the housing market, for example, but more broadly on these big economic questions where there hasn't been a big range of choice through

traditional representative democracy mechanisms through voting for parties, there's been a broad consensus.

And so the potential to

have an impact on these issues that affect us all has become very reduced.

So on the one hand, think people see kind of the narrowing potential of traditional democratic decision making.

But the flip side of that, which you just alluded to, I think, is the potential for alternative mechanisms of exercising political power.

And there, think more about

m civil society movements or grassroots movements, which look at um formulating discussions and consensus through non-traditional means.

um And I mentioned uh the sunflower movement, but I think also um in Spain after the anti-austerity movement, um you had this big m

vast movement which fed into the creation of new models of citizen engagement.

I'm thinking partly through the party structure of uh Podemos, which tried to open up more to its membership and to allow the membership to shape their policies a little more with

varying success, it has to be said.

But also in Barcelona, where the DeciDem platform was launched, another digital

participation platform um and where the newly elected mayor Ada Colau, I hope I'm saying her name okay, um tried to gather up the energy that came through that grassroots movement

and channel that into her plan for the city over the next four years.

Yeah, was...

Yeah, also the changes that we can do.

As you said, I was thinking about, yeah, let's say personal power, like the fact that I can do something, I can call you, you can call me, and this is a small power, but then

it's...

I mean, something that we can do, but a lot of times we don't do it.

Or like also we can send a mail to the mayor uh saying that we don't agree about certain oh things, but most of the people don't do it, also if they have the power.

em

yeah.

But I think there's also a sense that one of the things that's changed is people get the sense that the mayor doesn't necessarily have that much power to do things about these

issues either.

Or if we think, if we come back to the question of big tech, um there can be a sense that Europe has been making serious efforts to regulate what's going on um in social media and

now with em the hype around AI.

um

But I think a lot of people are aware that to an extent they have to cater to patterns of power that are beyond their control.

know, the big tech wields a lot of power.

And now with the Trump administration, who've made it very clear that they intend to protect big tech as a national and American industry, that that also restricts the power

of Europe.

to regulate this technology.

um And it's going to be really important to see over the coming months and years whether Europe is able to hold its ground and um whether it really embraces the mission of um

becoming a home for where technology and democracy kind of work hand in hand or whether um non-democratic

forces went out and Big Tech is allowed to run riot in the way that it has done over the last decade or so.

Yes, we were saying before the interview, in the future, probably the political system will change in some way, but still we don't know in which way.

Could be a very good one or a very bad one.

And I wonder what are your thoughts about...

uh

let's say how to go for a good system and how to and what to avoid to go.

Yeah, yeah, I I wish I wish I had an easy answer to that question.

um Because I think a lot of people are trying to figure that out right now.

And it's, um you know, it's a scary time for the Democrats.

um And I think I've always been a big fan of deliberative theories of democracy.

Of the idea that the quality of democracy

really depends on the quality of the communication or the discourse that informs decision making.

um So sometimes deliberative democracies used in a more narrow sense to describe things like mini publics and citizens assemblies, but in the broader sense, I think it has to do

with uh the quality of public discourse.

And that's something that we've seen decline rapidly.

um in the internet era.

Social media has restructured the way that that communication works, partly by taking things out of the hands of traditional media and putting them into an unregulated arena,

but partly with mechanisms that encourage conflict.

um Yeah, sorry.

No, no, it was actually a question but I don't know how much it is related so if you want to say something else.

um Otherwise I was thinking like...

um

There were some attempts, like I'm thinking also about the 5 Star Movement, they tried with a platform in Italy, uh but then maybe it didn't work.

ah But also there were some individuals that tried to run.

As an example, I interviewed...

Michihito that he tried to ah create this AI major.

And I was thinking, I mean, what do you think about this kind of experiment?

And also if you think that ah like a very good platform could actually work.

Because at the moment I see like uh we have a certain political system.

that is representative of democracy in Europe, the US.

And this is a system.

And then, I mean, we can also think about other kind of governance systems, completely new, ah but then they will be a little bit disruptive.

And so how to, you know, with the system that we have now to just make some small experiments.

Yeah, yeah, I see.

I mean, I have to say, I think I'm a fan of representative democracy.

And I know, I think there's, there's a kind of division line within the democratic innovation space, I think, between people who somehow think that um the system of

representative democracy of elections is outdated and needs to be replaced.

um I fall much more down on the side of m

We need to improve the discourse that surrounds elections and we need to improve communication between politicians and the public above all.

um So I'm interested in all kinds of democratic innovation.

I think the ones that get me the most excited are projects that improve that flow of communication.

um And to give maybe one example, a couple of years ago now,

uh I looked at a project called Connecting to Parliament.

And this was based in Australia.

And it was a project that was run out of a research lab at the University of Canberra, I believe.

But what they did was to connect uh a member of parliament with uh a randomly selected group of their constituents.

and the parliament was going to have a free vote, so a vote where MPs weren't constrained to vote along with their party, because you know in the Westminster system if you vote

against your party you can get you can get fired.

So um this experiment wouldn't work with one of those votes but they were having a vote on mitochondrial donation which is a controversial topic because um

Basically, it's a uh technique that allows um doctors to identify potential genetic defects in children prior to birth or uh sorry, some parents have a pre-disposition to

this and it's a treatment that would prevent this genetic defect in newly born children.

But it's controversial because it involves um donation from a third party.

So exactly, em sorry if that's not clear.

But I mean, the broad point is, is the question of bioethics em and members of the public were invited to discuss the issue with a member of parliament.

Now, in the end, he said from the start that he wouldn't just vote how these people told him to vote.

It would be a discussion.

But what I found very interesting about this project was that it was demonstrated to have

improved trust between the members of the public and this politician.

And it actually was based on a project in the United States called Connecting to Congress based on the same idea.

And again, the results there was that um people, when interviewed after the format, said that they had more trust in their representative.

including across party lines.

So if they were talking to a Republican congressman, they said that they trusted their congressman more than they did going in, regardless of their affiliation.

They also said they were more likely to vote for that um congressman, regardless of party affiliation.

um And for me, um it's in improving this relationship that I see the most hope because um

At the moment, I think populists are exploiting a lack of faith in the public, in our representatives.

um The relationship has been problematic for a long time.

A lot of the communication resembles marketing.

It's a campaigning thing.

That's the form that we're used to communicating with representatives and making a space for an honest dialogue.

between representatives and members of the public um is really promising.

Yeah, I'm thinking that also, as you said, we are used to this kind of uh marketing style and at the same time I wonder if like a party that try to be honest and so if it can

actually succeed or in some way it's like a sort of...

system that everyone has to follow if they want to be elected.

I think um very much at the national level, that's true.

And when you're running a national campaign, think honesty can be harmful, unfortunately.

And there's a reason why white parties use these strategies.

um I guess I'm thinking about things on a much more modest scale.

um A lot of the projects that I look at concern

uh local council representatives.

So might not even be your representative in the national parliament.

It could just be someone from the local government.

But I think it's an important step towards humanizing the people involved, putting a face on the politicians who hold power in your area, making you realize that these are human

beings facing very difficult decisions, getting the public involved.

in these local level decision makings can help them to understand the kind of trade-offs that politicians are forced to make, the difficulties that they face in their work.

And my feeling, my hope is that this can have a bit of a trickle-up effect.

So if I personally know the representative of the conservative or the socialist party in my local council, perhaps

that improves my attitude towards the party at the national level.

m I go back to m Alexis de Tocqueville, a uh Frenchman from an aristocratic family after the French Revolution.

traveled to the United States in the 1830s, I think, to see why democracy was working better in the United States than in France.

m

And he concluded it worked best of all in New England, in the states in the Northeast, around New York and Connecticut and um Maine, because um the local representatives were

people from the community.

They had other jobs in the community.

There was not an aristocratic structure that pre-existed, so they weren't,

people with noble connections that gave them a particular standing in the community.

was relatively level starting out.

uh And people knew their local representatives.

And now part of this is down to the particular way that federal government worked in the United States at the time.

think local authorities had a lot more power and the federal government would only get involved on bigger issues.

But everything I've

the most encouraging things I've seen in the last few years um have all started at this very modest local government level or with local grassroots movements.

um And I think this is a great way of giving people an entry point into a democratic mindset, let's say.

Yeah, and uh because you mentioned Tocqueville, I'm thinking also about the dictatorship of the majority.

ah And in some way, maybe with this new system, platforms and so on, we can also maybe not have it anymore.

ah To have a sort of consensus based or...

divisions, don't know, like to find a new solution.

Yeah, I mean, I think when you asked me to define democracy, I kind of left some important things out because obviously we live in liberal democracies and that has pluses and

minuses.

But obviously one of the things, one of the big advantages of liberal democracy is that it does not allow the majority to dictate how the minority should live and that it includes

provisions to protect minorities.

um And I think populists, when they talk about democracy and about um empowering their voters, um they want a model of democracy that doesn't respect the rights of minorities.

They really want something like a majority rule.

um So I thought it was important to say that.

I think you're right, that um these platforms um provide

provide a space that's an alternative to kind of people's private bubbles on social media, where instead of um doubling down our own positions, we can start to move towards a

consensus.

Yeah.

Yeah, because in some way, um this is my thought, that the rule of majority sometimes can be also quite violent.

And a lot of times we are used to think about if the majority agree, then it's a democratic decision, also between friends or colleagues.

ah

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, yeah, I mean, coming back to the deliberative definition of democracy, the idea, em the idea there is the strongest argument wins rather than the loudest one, right?

And the idea is not, em it's not a democracy just because you're giving everybody a choice and then you're taking the outcome of that choice.

What needs to happen before that is a reasoned discussion where the rights of different groups within a society are given equal weight.

And it's not supposed to be a shouting match where the biggest group wins.

Taking part in a democracy means relinquishing your own position and taking account of the needs of other people as well.

And I think, again, that's something that populists

em deliberately overlook, they encourage an attitude of you should be demanding more, these people are taking something away from you and you should be angry about this.

And that's the populist definition of democracy, where they even eh bother pretending to be democratic any longer, because I think even that's eh questionable at the moment.

And I'm thinking like in let's say in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, ah like what do you think about we will see in the future about uh democratic innovations or like how could it

work for you like uh

Yeah, that's interesting.

mean, I think

focusing a lot on the digital stuff as I do.

um I am curious to see whether these efforts can be successfully scaled because one of the issues that we've had with these kind of formats before is um orchestrating a conversation

between thousands or hundreds of thousands and millions of people uh is not something that's been possible in the past.

um

With the kind of digital platforms that were launched in the last 10 years or so, it's become easier to orchestrate these large level conversations with thousands of

contributors.

There are various platforms at various stages of development using AI analysis with the hope of orchestrating conversations where an unlimited number of people uh could be taking

part.

So on the one hand, I'm thinking of the um deliberative platform developed by the University of Stanford, um which is used for a particular kind of mini public called a

deliberative polling.

But technologically, already gives you the possibility of staging the conversation with millions of participants.

Now, the problem that

they've encountered and that I think a lot of these formats will encounter is it's difficult to get the people to take part.

You have to put something on the table for them.

And in some cases with the Stanford lab, that's been payments.

They did their first digital deliberation back in about 2005, I think, at which stage they were sending participants free computers so that they could connect to the internet

because they didn't.

They didn't all have computers.

um But I'm curious to see more of the results of these um AI tools and how successfully they can synthesize inputs um and how successful they are at making sure that the nuances

of the debate aren't left behind.

um Another platform that you might know, I think I mentioned it already, is Polis, um which was used in the VTaiwan.

project earlier this year, they launched Polis 2.0, um which I haven't had the chance to see in action yet, but which I'm very curious about because to me, it looks like the most

sophisticated AI driven, um let's say, consensus forming platform.

And in contrast to existing platforms, which tend to be

iterative.

in the kind of digital participation programs running around Europe at the moment, um a government will or a local government will come up with a question which they put to a

public and they can deal with a few thousand responses potentially.

um There's a window of maybe a week where you can contribute your ideas and then

someone at the local government or from an outside agency works to digest those results and come up with a report.

The way that Polis 2.0 is set up is much, much more open.

um First, the fact that it's AI driven means that you can ask open questions.

you know, traditionally the way of dealing with lots and lots of inputs is to pose yes, no questions.

And if you have a questionnaire with yes, no questions, can quickly, you could already in the sixties, feed that into a computer.

And it would tell you this many people voted yes, this many people voted no.

um With these newer systems, um you can ask very open questions.

um Another platform doing this is GoVocal, who ran a project with the NHS in the UK.

And they were able to start with questions like, tell me about your experiences as a patient of the NHS.

um And they then used um LLMs to identify

common topics and to synthesize the results of these conversations.

The goal, as I've understood it, for Polis 2.0 is that you could potentially have ongoing conversations within communities that are open-ended.

And it uses visual mapping to show which topics are showing up.

What matters to people most?

And it almost has the potential, at least, to create something like an alternative social media mapping exercise, where instead of seeing what people are talking about on a

platform like X, where the algorithm is designed to bring out the worst in people, you could be collecting a massive amount of inputs.

but structured around an algorithm that's been specifically designed to draw out consensus.

And that's something that I find very exciting.

Yeah, I also like I'm very excited and I'm thinking about what you said about the abilities of AI to really understand what the people are talking about.

uh I think that if not, I think that at the moment, probably they are quite good.

I'm also doing some experiments uh on a small platform, but I also think that in a couple of years we will have some.

uh

very good AI that will be able to do it a proper way.

So I'm also excited about the scaling factor because one thing is having like an experiment with 100 people and another is really trying to deliberate on...

Yeah, absolutely.

I I think I'm maybe more skeptical than you.

I think there's a possibility that with LLMs we're reaching a bit of a ceiling at the moment.

I've had mixed results in my own work using AI.

Sometimes it's very, very good.

Sometimes it misses the mark.

Talking to the people administrating these kind of um participation projects, they seem confident that it's giving a fairly accurate summary.

um

what they couldn't speak to as much was whether it was leaving important things out, because if you're synthesizing this many different inputs, really covering all the bases

becomes difficult.

I think the other important thing, and I mentioned it in relation to the Stanford project, is securing buy-in for these kind of platforms.

So first of all, can you get people to...

sign up and to give their opinions.

the answer has been yes when the number of participants was limited to 100 or 1000, although it usually costs a lot of effort and a lot of money to get those 100 people or

those 1000 people.

Doing that on a much larger scale is very ambitious.

To do so, I think you need the other side of the coin, which is buy in from

from governments, so someone in power pledging to take these inputs seriously.

I think that is easier to do when they have control over the question being asked.

So if they're using a platform, they've said, we've decided that we're rebuilding this park and we'd like your input, some whether you would like a playground or a pond.

If you're talking about a system like Polis 2.0,

where potentially citizens can bring up whatever they like and because the technology facilitates that, getting politicians to say, to commit in some way to taking the results

of that seriously becomes much more problematic.

But perhaps the answer then is that these technologies um return to their kind of grassroots uh

origins because Desidim and Consul, these came out of grassroots movements.

And maybe the people consulting these platforms aren't first and foremost politicians.

Maybe it's journalists who are looking to get an idea of what people are talking about.

Or maybe it is political parties who want to connect with their voter base.

Or maybe it is uh civil society.

And um because they also in a healthy democracy civil society exercises influence over decision making processes.

And if they can demonstrate that millions of members of the public agree with them, um that can play into their hands as well.

Yeah, at the end there are a lot of power dynamics behind.

And yeah, I also saw that participation like the fact that, I mean, building a platform now it's easy, but to get people involved it's quite hard.

And also I was thinking about the commitment from politicians.

That is also another...

problem I would say uh because I mean some people could run for an election now saying that they will use the platform and they can also say that they will just do what the

platform says so what the citizens are talking about.

done.

It's definitely been done already.

I'm not sure if they use digital platforms, but in Germany and the UK, think there were people promising to use democratic innovations to collect inputs from citizens and to vote

accordingly in parliament.

Yeah, but what I think is that because there is not really a commitment, like they just say it and then they can also do the platform in a way where poles are just like about, I

don't know, which color to choose to paint the building.

uh

yeah.

The worst I think we saw was a project in Germany somewhere and it was you could choose the name of a ship on the playground.

They were going to put the name of the ship on the side of the...

Why would people take part in something like that?

But I think you're right that there's the risk that politicians see this as either a PR tool or another kind of polling tool.

I think if you look at what happened in France and Macron has experimented with varying formats of democratic innovation.

When he launched en marche uh the political party, he first promised a kind of bottom-up, ideas-gathering party structure where anyone could launch a local branch.

That was a very clever move on his part because it meant he could very, very quickly grow a party base.

But eventually the promises weren't.

delivered on, the membership basis was supposed to be allowed to select a portion of his cabinet, and that promise very quickly fell away.

He also launched um the public notebook uh project during the Yellow Dust protests, um where you had something like a million people show up either online or to their local town

halls to write their inputs into these notebooks that were left out.

to say what they think needed to change.

his initial promise was, are going to use this to develop a new sort of manifesto.

And it didn't happen.

And in fact, he promised to share scans online of all of the notebooks and that hasn't happened yet either.

um So he's done other things they had.

He has integrated um citizens assemblies into um

the structure of French government more seriously than has happened elsewhere.

um But I think he illustrates the risk.

First of all, the appeal that this stuff can have to politicians and then the risk that as soon as um it's propelled them into office or as soon as it's fulfilled their purpose for

them that they lose interest.

I'm still thinking about this commitment thing and we said there are some power dynamics so we can understand the point of view of a politician that reads the report of a platform

and that report is going against

him or what he wants to do.

I mean, we can understand the point of view, like why he's not interested in applying ah what has been discussed or decided by the people.

And I can understand also what you were saying before, like that maybe a platform like...

m

can be helpful, mentioned, I don't know, organization or maybe political parties that then they can show like, hey, there are a lot of people that are supporting us and they want

this, maybe they have a list of changes.

And so I am thinking, is it like that commitment has to go with power dynamics?

Like they have to...

This is a big question and I think this is where my opinion differs slightly from some other people in this sector because for a lot of them, the key to a successful format is

that it has some kind of direct impact at the level of legislation.

So the best example of a citizens assembly is one where the Irish examples are always cited, but where you have

Well, in that case, you had uh deliberations on topics including blasphemy, but also uh same sex marriage and abortion.

And these were then put to a referendum and they led to changes in Irish law.

So uh gay marriage was legalized in part thanks to a democratic innovation and abortion was legalized in part thanks to this.

I was chatting with someone from Ireland the other day who said, who pointed out that, know, for the

parties involved, this was a way of getting some very difficult issues out of their hands, right?

This was for them, I don't want to have to deal with the issue of abortion, we'll just hand this over to these people and let them make the decision.

There are other cases where these formats have had a direct impact on legislation, but more often than not, they lead to a set of recommendations and then it fails to gain

traction at the parliamentary level.

I personally don't know if all of our efforts should really be focused on closing that gap.

I think where I see potential is in for these formats to shift public discussion.

And this comes back to the deliberative democracy thing that I was talking about.

I'll give you an example I've been thinking about a lot.

Recently, I live in Berlin, where housing prices have exploded over the last 10, 15 years.

And in the last couple of weeks, I started seeing articles in the mainstream media saying, you know what, we've let property speculators run riot in our cities and this is a problem

for Europe.

my response to that is to say, we know and I know that and my neighbors know that.

And this is something that people I know have been discussing in private for a very, very long time, but it's not reflected at the level of public discourse.

um

the conversations that are happening in newspapers and in parliaments and in political campaigns often fail to reflect the concerns of people at ground level.

These tools, especially large-scale digital solutions, have the potential to allow us to listen in on the actual concerns that people have, the actual conversations that they're

having.

um

And I'm not sure that it's important that um those conversations then lead directly to legislation, right?

It doesn't have to be, okay, Parliament has agreed that whatever these people are talking about will be implemented.

It's far too complicated to make a promise like that.

You have commitments to your party.

um But my hope a little bit is that you would see like a broader shift um where

the public have some sway on shifting the direction of public discourse.

And then maybe where we hear very, very loudly discussions about migration, which I think is something a lot of people are concerned about, maybe we would also start to hear about

some of the other concerns that don't get amplified by the right-wing press.

uh And so this is really where I come from.

when I think about these platforms.

I'm thinking about what you were saying that uh people have, uh let's call them, private political discussions.

They discuss about politics, about what they don't like in their city town.

And so, because I thought a lot that we should in some way...

find a way to uh give value to the richness of these conversations because sometimes they are very deep, sometimes they...

maybe could be that, like, I don't know, I have a conversation with you, it could be also this, like a private call, but at the same time, the transcription, the eyes analyzing and

so on.

So instead of...

asking to the people to participate, I don't know, for a...

assembly on a specific platform and so on.

Maybe we should just build a platform that integrates with their lives and so they can live and at the same time also participate in the political life.

Yeah, no, I think that's right.

I think the good thing about this is um it doesn't require political uptake necessarily.

It doesn't require a prime minister or a president to say, OK, we pledge to do whatever the people conclude in this.

um There are newspapers uh throughout Europe who are very interested in this stuff and alternative modes of

uh gauging public opinion and there have been experiments um with different magazine formats and stuff.

The Süddeutsche and the Spiegel in Germany have both been engaged in sort of different modes of collecting public opinion.

And I think the press um in a well-functioning democracy, they play that mediating role between the political class and

the public and um I think they can play an important role in feeding back to the public the political difficulties of of realizing every wish that we might have, right?

But they also should be reflecting those conversations that are being held in private and the things that matter to people most.

And I think most journalists, well, most journalists at reputable

reputable outlets want to do that.

We do have a problem with um populist press that um is just spitting out clickbait um and serving as an amplifier for public anger.

But I think the press at its best um should really be reflecting the everyday concerns that people have.

um And if the press

succeed at doing that better.

think we can expect a higher quality of political debate.

I think we can expect political parties to listen um and to start forming their manifestos around, know, political manifestos are driven by public discourse.

had parties here in Germany, the liberal party suddenly turned into an anti-immigration party before the next, the last elections.

And this

went against years of practice on that part, but they saw that it was the dominant topic in the media and they reacted.

Well, think if we can find a way of tapping the other, again, I'm not saying we shouldn't be talking about migration as an issue.

It's clearly a concern for a lot of people, but I think there's a lot of frustration on other issues, on housing, on public health.

Right?

And health care, uh parents who are struggling uh with full-time work and inadequate childcare, if we had a better way of monitoring all of those concerns, then that would

feed into a healthier representative democracy.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I had some thoughts ah because at the moment there are platforms that I mean, we can build a platform or brainstorm about the platform that

private conversation, mean, private people that want to publish to share their conversation and thoughts.

ah But then I think about AI and I think that these are things that we should actually do as people in this space.

um And then I wonder like if this AI that is evolving so quickly...

If then like in some years it would be just that, you know, like if now ChiaGPT can listen to every conversation and so on, then you don't need any more a platform because that is

the platform.

But how did the initial inputs get gathered then?

Through Chatchi PT or?

Yeah, good question.

I don't know.

My concern there, and I I um I said before that I'm a little skeptical about the capacity of AI.

And I do think that the claims are getting less bold from the industry side.

Now there's been fewer claims of massive breakthroughs.

And I take that as a sign that things are slowing down because m they're doing marketing when they make these announcements.

you know, they will hype where they can.

um I think there's also the concern that chat GPT and all of these um chatbots will become more and more monetized and market driven, which is a pattern that we've seen with all of

tech.

You Google used to be a much better search engine before the whole thing.

was sold out to advertising and you now buy a higher ranking and it can be very difficult to find something on Google today precisely because its primary purpose is not to provide

you with answers but to generate profit through sponsored content.

And I think to my knowledge, that's not such an issue with ChatGPT.

They're trying out membership models, paid memberships.

The same thing happened with social media.

Social media was a much freer conversation that's gradually been funneled into this marketing logic.

um So I would expect, I would be skeptical that chat GPT would be the tool to do this because I think it will be more and more m enthralled to commercial interests over the

coming years.

um But I share some of your optimism that AI could be one of the tools that we use to

to connect to larger numbers of people.

Yeah, like I think also that maybe like if we uh build a tool specific for governance, participation and so on, then it would be also maybe more explainable.

It will not be a black box.

That is the big danger of having AI in governance.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and I think that's one of the big topics that needs to be addressed, at least finding a way of, um well, at first of monitoring the accuracy of these um AI outputs,

which is difficult when you're trying to scale big, um but also this problem that AI

poses wherever it's used by governments.

I'm looking at the kind of algorithms that they're using to catch tax frauds or things like this.

There's always an accountability problem when the people in government, the people making decisions, don't understand what's going on in this black box.

that creates uh a democratic deficit.

um

a sort of techno fate, I will say also.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think people are also skeptical, you know, and I think you need to be upfront with people.

I think people react differently if you say, if you write this message on this platform, someone in your local government will read it.

If you tell them, if you write this message, AI will digest this and spit out a result.

People are probably more skeptical and if they're not already, then they will be overcoming years.

I think there's still

In many quarters, there's still a lot of enthusiasm for AI and people have a lot of faith in it.

But the more, it's like automated answering services where you're talking to a robot.

think people will get more, you know, disenchanted and start to think, ah, can I talk to a person?

Is my voice really significant if it's just being digested by an algorithm that nobody really understands?

Yeah, so there's questions to be answered.

Yeah, I agree.

also this is something uh like that I've seen many platform, mean, civic tech platform that they ah have a chatbot and I think it's useful chatbot like can be uh it's a powerful

instrument, but at the same time

be nice to think about solutions that people can use in the real world, in, I don't know, face to face.

Like we should not talk to a chatbot, but we should talk to another person and maybe having a chatbot that will listen to us.

Yeah, and I think the best digital formats that I've seen over the last decade have been ones that include an offline component.

And if we go back to VTaiwan and we go back to Desidim and Consul, um these platforms were used as an extension of a grassroots political movement that was really based on going out

into the community.

um

I was talking to the VTaiwan team recently and they were saying one of the most important things is having meetings with good food.

It's about making people want to come together and talk to each other.

And I think even irrespective of outputs and what happens to the outputs of these processes, that's a definite plus.

If you can cultivate

um an attitude and a behavior in people where they are used to talking to people from within their community who they didn't know before, who maybe have different views to

them, and they get used to um a conversation structured around seeking consensus, then that's a big win for democracy even if um there's no immediate products from that.

um

The key is to do that in a way that people don't get frustrated and say, you know, this isn't producing any results, so why am I bothering?

um But I think in a way, it can also be its own reward.

I think I may be too optimistic and have too much faith in um the good nature of most people.

um But I do think that when you talk to people about their experiences um in many publics, say most people say,

It was a wonderful experience um that they benefited immensely from talking to people they wouldn't have otherwise met.

um If you can create an atmosphere where um people have more and more of these opportunities, and there are cities around Europe where this is the case, um Cache Caix in

Portugal is a great example.

they are, my organization, um

has a partner organization called European Capital of Democracy and beginning in November, think, CacheCache will hold the title of European Capital of Democracy.

And what CacheCache has done over the last 10 or 12 years, at least, is to implement more and more of these participative formats, to integrate them into sort of other government

services where people aren't...

are no longer doing this for the first time.

And if they go for a walk down their street, they will see some kind of project that was built thanks to public inputs gathered through a participatory budget.

And they will have friends or teachers who are community monitors who are helping the local government monitor problems in their area.

And I think if you can cultivate that kind of community at the local level,

um then that's maybe almost more important to me than this opinion collecting exercise, right?

Where, yes, it's important for people to have an input, but it's more important to get people to make an ethical commitment to...

democracy and that's something that that unfortunately is um eroding at the moment and more and more young people don't feel that connection.

So I would say that's almost more important than ever more sophisticated opinion gathering mechanisms.

Yeah, and just a couple of questions because would you like to share something about you?

Like your, I don't know, more personal, I don't know where you said you live in Berlin, but have you lived?

Yeah, um good question.

So I'm from the UK originally, from England.

um But um my family moved around quite a lot.

When I was smaller, I spent a bit of time in the States and in Australia.

um I've been living in the German speaking world for about 10 years now.

um I moved to Berlin while I was finishing up my PhD in philosophy.

uh

I guess that the, I'm a dad actually, I have a three year old son, so I'm learning to reassess political priorities in the wake of being a family and suddenly aware of how

small the voice of families is becoming in the political space.

It was announced a few weeks ago that among voters, parents are now actually in a minority.

they don't hold much sway.

Sorry, I've gone back on topic and away from the person.

um Otherwise, guess my other big passions outside of um democracy are probably music.

And I actually studied um electronic composition.

from an early age on, I guess, I was 17 when I started my degree and I was studying how digital tools

could change how music was composed.

So I guess there's always been this kind of this interest in how technology is changing.

I don't compose music these days, but yeah, music still plays a big part in my life.

This is interesting how I think like Let's say people discuss then there is an analysis Then music is composed based on the what the people talk about or maybe could be vice

versa like people Yeah, like a sort of disco where people can also talk and participate

Music is a great way of a great social bonding.

Yeah, yeah, because we were saying that the problem is participation, so that the people show up.

If there is music, usually people show up.

Yeah, I like that.

And if you have a message for the people in the space, other researchers, people that are...

question.

again, I think I said this at the start, but um I just to reiterate, we had quite a theoretical discussion again, and that's sort of my space, but that my ultimate respect

goes out to the people who are implementing these, these projects.

It's, it's, it's, fun having conversations about where this stuff is going and, and what problems we think it solves, but I

I just have tremendous respect for the people going out into the communities and making this stuff happen.

It's been my privilege to spend the last few years studying what they're doing and talking to them.

um So to them, sort of, guess, thank you and keep doing it.

um The other message, and I think maybe I alluded to this already, is that um representative democracy is a good thing.

It's probably the best thing.

human beings have ever achieved.

At the ballot box, each of us has an equal share in power.

know, 100, 200 years ago, this was a very abstract idea.

It hasn't been a reality for very long.

It was never perfected.

I don't think we should be promoting democratic innovations as an alternative to it.

At the moment,

it's a dangerous time to be thinking about changing anything, you know, and if you start talking about elections, a failed model, I think that's counterproductive.

So yeah, maybe my message would be please, please stop doing that.

Because in some cases, to promote these methods.

um And I've seen it, I've seen it on on fairly high level interviews and in major publications, you know, people saying elections are broken.

Here's why I'm any public is a better idea than that.

My feeling when I see something like that is always to ask how maybe like uh a black American community might feel, know, a community that fought for a long time to have the

right to vote and to run for office and to have their vote counted, to tell those people, you know, we're going to take the vote away, but don't worry.

When the decision is made, there will be at least

10 black people in the room.

That's a disaster, if you ask me.

So let's not help the populists trying to undermine representative democracy.

Let's find ways of strengthening it.

So thank you a lot, Graham.

Thank you.

a pleasure.

was my pleasure.