Deliberative Muscles and AI
Democracy is under strain. Polarisation is hardening, trust in inDemocracy is under strain, and one of the most promising responses to that strain is the growing global movement around deliberative assemblies: citizens' assemblies, citizens' juries, and related forums that bring randomly selected, broadly representative groups of people together to weigh evidence, listen to one another, and make shared decisions on complex public issues. Over 1,000 such processes have now been run worldwide, and a growing body of evidence suggests they depolarise opinion, generate well-reasoned recommendations, build trust, and reconnect people to political life.
However, these processes are also resource-intensive, slow, and hard to scale, and have thus become a site of intense interest for AI integration. The pitch from many technologists, practitioners, and funders is consistent: AI can make deliberation cheaper, faster, more accessible, and more scalable.
In this paper, Claudia Chwalisz, Sammy McKinney, Jorim Theuns, and Eugene Yi argue that AI, when designed with care, can indeed play a powerful role in strengthening deliberation. But the very efficiencies that make AI attractive also risk undermining what deliberation is for in the first place.
Their starting point is that deliberative assemblies are not decision-making machines whose sole value lies in the recommendation they produce. They are also spaces in which participants exercise and develop the civic capacities that democratic life depends upon. If we automate too much, we may end up with smoother processes that hollow out the productive friction that makes them valuable, while simultaneously reducing people's ability to participate in democratic life.
The authors make three contributions:
First, they argue that one of the most important and most overlooked virtues of deliberative assemblies is that they build deliberative muscles: the cognitive, dispositional, and relational capacities that citizens need to do the work of democracy together.
Second, they offer a typology of seven deliberative muscles: self-reflection, reasoning, dialogue, vulnerability, collaboration, imagination, and facilitation. For each muscle, they map AI uses. Context matters throughout: the same tool can strengthen a muscle in one setting and substitute for it in another.
Third, they argue that the exercise of these seven muscles, sustained across many people and many processes over time, is what produces the societal capacity that resilient democratic systems require. This has implications for civic infrastructure: for the training, standards, and ecosystem-building bodies that sustain deliberative practice; for how we think about AI ownership, provenance, and dependency; and for the case for a civic AI future in which communities are not merely end-users of DelibTech but central to the conditions that make it work at all.
The central design question for anyone building, commissioning, or funding deliberative technology is therefore not whether AI produces a recommendation faster, but whether it leaves participants, facilitators, and the wider institutional ecosystem more capable at the end of the process than at the start.
Join the authors, together with respondents Lisa Gutermuth (Mozilla Foundation), Mauricio Mejia (Advisor on democratic change), and Maggie Hughes (CEO and Co-founder, Convoca), for this launch event to discuss the paper and its implications for different sectors. The event will be moderated by Andrew Sorota (Office of Eric Schmidt).
What to expect:
Why deliberative assemblies are sites where we exercise and strengthen the capacities that democratic life requires
The seven deliberative muscles and how technology can help or hinder each
The distinction between complementary and competitive AI uses in deliberative practice
What this means for practitioners deciding how to integrate AI, technologists deciding what to build, and funders deciding what to back.
This paper is for people with the authority and responsibility of deciding how technology is going to be deployed in a deliberative process - commissioning authorities in government and other organisations, as well as democracy practitioners, designers, and facilitators. We are also writing for technologists deciding what to build, for funders deciding what to back, and for scholars mapping a fast-moving field.
Speakers:
Claudia Chwalisz, Author, Founder and CEO, DemocracyNext
Claudia has been working on democratic innovation for 15 years, initially sparked by her research on populism, and the extent to which it is driven by people’s disillusionment with the political system, and with a lack of agency to shape the decisions affecting their lives. Claudia was involved in designing the world’s first permanent citizens’ assemblies in Paris, Ostbelgien, and Brussels. Claudia established and led the OECD’s work on innovative citizen participation from 2018-2022, creating the Deliberative Democracy Toolbox, which includes a public database of over 700 examples of Citizens’ Assemblies, the flagship report Catching the Deliberative Wave (2020), standards for implementation (2020), and guidelines for evaluation and institutionalisation of deliberative assemblies (2021), as well guidelines for citizen participation processes (2022). Claudia founded DemocracyNext in 2022.
Sammy McKinney, Author, AI & Deliberation Fellow, DemocracyNext, and PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Sammy is a PhD student in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His PhD research critically explores the integration of artificial intelligence into processes of public deliberation, especially citizens’ assemblies. This research expands on his master’s thesis carried out at the University of Edinburgh, which he published in an adapted form in the Journal of Deliberative Democracy. Beyond academia, Sammy has facilitated AI governance courses for BlueDot Impact, co-developed ethical guidelines for AI in public deliberation with deliberAIde, and planned tech-enhanced conservation projects with partners from across the globe through Rainforest Connection.
Jorim Theuns, Author, Co-Founder, Dembrane
Jorim is the CEO and co-founder of Dembrane, a civic tech initiative dedicated to transforming how democratic participation works in everyday life. At the heart of Dembrane’s work is the belief that democracy should be more than a political event every few years, it should be part of how we govern our cities, design public services, and make collective decisions.
Eugene Yi, Author, Impact Research Fellow, DemocracyNext
Eugene Yi is an experienced tech entrepreneur, product and media executive, and policy expert. Previously, he co-founded Cortico to help build tech-enhanced deliberative systems for our democracy. His experiences range from leading Asia policy at Twitter from 2012 to 2016, and he was previously the Head of Product at Hawkfish, a digital technology and data firm founded by Mike Bloomberg. He served in the U.S. Department of Defense and was a U.S. diplomat early in his career. He received his AB and MPA from Princeton University, and is a Visiting Researcher at MIT and a PhD candidate at Oxford University.
Lisa Gutermuth, Senior Program Officer, Mozilla Foundation
Lisa is a senior program officer with the Mozilla Foundation Incubator, where her work focuses on identifying and supporting technologies that give power back to people and communities. She is also a representative member of Green Screen Coalition, which works toward building out the intersection of climate justice and digital rights. She has also been a visiting researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin, and served on the jury of the German Prototype Fund from 2019-2023. Prior to working with Mozilla, Lisa was a senior program manager at Ranking Digital Rights, and a project coordinator with Tactical Technology Collective, where she focused on digital security, remote sensing, and sustainability.
Maggie Hughes, CEO & Co-founder, Convoca
Maggie is the CEO and co-founder of Convoca, a civic technology organisation building infrastructure for relational civic life. A community organizer and facilitator, her work sits at the intersection of data, technology, and democracy, asking how we strengthen the practices democratic life depends on, and what role technology can play to foster rather than erode civic relationships. She holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab's Center for Constructive Communication, where she co-developed and deployed Voice to Vision and Lumos, grounding two New York City neighborhood plans in community voice alongside planners and supporting community organizing with partners like the Carolina Federation. Convoca grew out of this research, the vehicle she and her co-founders built to bring this work into the world for the long term, so that through learning and co-creation, communities build lasting civic agency, leadership, and capacity.
Mauricio Mejía, Advisor on democratic change
Mauricio Mejía is based in Mexico City, where he works at the intersection of democracy, citizen participation, and technology. He collaborates with civil society organisations across Latin America to promote sortition as an alternative to party-based representation and citizens’ assemblies as deliberative models to enrich collective decision making. He advises governments and international organisations and was recently elected to a participatory governance body in Mexico City. Mauricio is a member of international networks including Democracy R&D, People Powered, and Démocratie Ouverte, and he previously coordinated citizen participation at the OECD, worked in French institutions, and taught at Sciences Po Paris.
Moderated by:
Andrew Sorota, Head of Research for the Office of Eric Schmidt
Andrew has worked on the teams of Eric Schmidt and Fareed Zakaria since graduating from Yale with a BA in Political Science and Philosophy in 2022. His main research interests are populism and democratic innovations. He wrote “Why picking citizens at random could be the best way to govern the A.I. revolution” for Fortune Magazine with Hélène Landemore and Audrey Tang.
This webinar will be recorded and shared after the session via our YouTube channel.