AI for Democracy

Edited by Ilaria Mariani, Jennifer Edmond, George Manias and Maria Panou

AI for Democracy – Human-Centric, Trustworthy, and Inclusive Innovations explores how AI is reshaping democratic governance and offers actionable frameworks grounded in design-led, participatory, and socio-technical approaches.

The book addresses key challenges such as inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability, while tackling risks related to bias, opacity, and institutional readiness. It is meant for policymakers, designers, researchers, and civic tech practitioners working at the intersection of AI and democracy.

The ORBIS scaling framework as designed in D3.1 ‘The ORBIS deliberation scaling mechanism’. Image taken from the essay ‘Why AI and Democracy?’ by Ilaria Mariani, Sabrina Sacco, Alessandro Deserti, Jennifer Edmond, George Manias, Sotiris Athanassopoulos, Spiros Borotis, Fabiana Fournier, Lior Limonad, Katerina Touliou, Aristotelis Spiliotis, and Maria Panou

The book is the result of a collective effort across four Horizon Europe projects – ORBIS, KT4D, AI4Gov, and ITHACA – sister projects under the Democracy calls (Cluster 2) on Reshaping democracies. The four projects founded the Task Force on AI, Big Data & Democracy, which has now grown to include 8 projects and countinue to expande.

Situation aware explainability (SAX) conceptual model. Image taken from the essay ‘Why AI and Democracy?’ by Ilaria Mariani, Sabrina Sacco, Alessandro Deserti, Jennifer Edmond, George Manias, Sotiris Athanassopoulos, Spiros Borotis, Fabiana Fournier, Lior Limonad, Katerina Touliou, Aristotelis Spiliotis, and Maria Panou.
AI-enabled civic participation as a socio-technical and institutional system. Image taken from the essay ‘Data Management in AI-Enhanced Democratic Systems’ by Katerina Touliou, Maria Panou, Aristotelis Spiliotis, Nikos Chandrinos, Ioannis Symeonidis, Ilaria Mariani, Francesca Rizzo, and Jennifer Edmond.

This volume is edited by one representative from each project, but brings together contributions from a large number of authors across the four projects, making it a truly collective outcome.

AI for Democracy is available in Springer Nature's open access catalog (Cham), as part of the Springer Series in Design and Innovation.

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