A Better Democracy or No Democracy? Imaginaries of Synthetic Democracy in AI-Driven Political Actors

The rapid diffusion of generative artificial intelligence has brought more synthetic political actors into democratic politics. AI candidates, AI ministers, and AI-led political parties increasingly themselves not simply as technological tools but as political actors capable of transforming democratic governance. While existing scholarship has examined AI in relation to civic participation, deliberation, electoral campaigns, and political representation, empirical research on synthetic politics remains limited. This article investigates the sociotechnical imaginaries of democracy embedded in synthetic political actors, asking how these initiatives imagine democratic politics and what normative assumptions underpin their visions of political order. The study combines a desk-based review of existing cases of synthetic politics with a multimodal reflexive thematic analysis of campaign websites, official documents, videos, press releases, and related materials. Drawing on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, the analysis identifies three recurring dimensions that structure the imaginary of synthetic democracy: anti-politics, participation, and technocracy. Synthetic political actors consistently portray contemporary representative politics as dysfunctional and partisan, promise more participatory forms of governance enabled by AI, and frame artificial intelligence as a neutral and objective technology capable of improving political decision-making. These dimensions converge into a form of synthetic techno-populism that simultaneously claims privileged access to the will of the people and to technically optimal solutions. The article argues that this democratic imaginary sits uneasily with established democratic theory. By reducing politics to information processing and technical problem-solving, synthetic political actors challenge conceptions of politics as a sphere of human action, weaken the role of representation and political mediation, and narrow participation to the aggregation of individual preferences. At the same time, however, synthetic democracy performs an important imaginative function by questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about democracy and expanding the range of futures that can be imagined. Rather than simply representing a threat to democracy, synthetic political actors may play a key democratic role in renewing contemporary stagnating imaginaries of democracy itself.