Nurturing Virtues with Digital Democratic Innovations

Digital democratic innovations (DDIs) have been widely discussed by both academics and practitioners as a promising way to involve citizens in political decision-making processes on a larger scale. There has been a lot of research on how to design DDIs that would be genuinely deliberative, inclusive, and that would accurately represent people’s needs. However, little seems to be written about how DDIs might nurture individual democratic virtues. We believe that there is a missed opportunity here, and in our paper, we aim to bridge this gap. We argue that the cultivation of democratic virtues should be more central when it comes to digital citizen participation, and we explicitly focus on how deliberative DDIs can help individuals develop virtuous qualities. Beyond providing a potentially more inclusive and democratic decision-making mechanism, DDIs should be seen as an opportunity for individuals to develop their virtues and become better citizens, and, arguably, better people. We distinguish broadly between two types of virtues, namely epistemic and moral virtues, and we explore how DDIs can nurture these virtues in a way that is different from other forms of deliberative democratic innovations. To that end, we put forward some practical proposals for DDI design features that could be conducive to cultivation of both epistemic and moral virtues. For instance, we suggest using AI discussion prompts to challenge participants’ views and encourage open-mindedness, and having a special storytelling section where people can share personal stories and thus develop empathy.