The Workshop examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping the infrastructure and agency of electoral competition across individual, organisational, and institutional levels. It aims to integrate research on AI-driven campaigning, electoral behaviour, party organisation, populist leadership, and democratic governance. Particular attention will be devoted to microtargeting, predictive analytics, AI-enhanced voting advice applications, automated content generation, synthetic parties, and autonomous political agents. The Workshop also explores how AI may transform voter attitudes and choices, amplify populist communication and leadership strategies, and alter electoral institutions and governance, with broader implications for electoral integrity, accountability, democratic resilience, and potential democratic backsliding.
Election campaigns are undergoing a profound transformation as digital technologies become increasingly embedded in political communication, voter mobilisation, party organisation, and electoral competition. Whereas earlier research on digital campaigning focused primarily on social media, online mobilisation, and organisational adaptation (Dommett et al. 2024; Gibson et al. 2024; Lisi 2024), a newer strand highlights the democratic risks associated with AI-driven campaigning across multiple levels (Borz and de Francesco 2024; Garnett & James 2025; Yardimci-Geyikci et al. 2026).
The rapid diffusion of AI, sophisticated data analytics, automated communication, and generative technologies represents more than the adoption of new campaign tools. It is transforming the actors, infrastructures, and mechanisms through which electoral competition operates, with important implications for transparency, accountability, political equality, electoral integrity, and democratic resilience.
Yet research remains fragmented across subfields. Party scholarship examines organisational adaptation and strategy (Barbera et al. 2021); political communication focuses on platforms, disinformation, and susceptibility to misinformation (Lewandowsky & Van Der Linden 2021); while electoral integrity research has traditionally emphasised electoral procedures, administration, and human democratic empowerment (James and Garnett 2026). AI increasingly cuts across these boundaries.
The Workshop provides an innovative forum for integrating these perspectives and developing a comparative research agenda on AI-enabled electioneering. By connecting campaign innovation with electoral integrity, populism, and institutional responses, it will examine when AI strengthens democratic resilience and when it may facilitate democratic backsliding. Building on recent advances (Ulnicane 2025), it asks how AI governance can preserve accountability, informed choice, equality, and trust under rapidly changing technological conditions.
1: What new electoral actors, including synthetic parties and autonomous political agents, are emerging in the AI era?
2: Which policy disinformation narratives are being amplified by AI and in which contexts?
3: How do AI electoral tools (e.g. VAA) shape voters’ choices, turnout and trust in digital democracy?
4: How do AI affect transparency, responsibility, and accountability across countries?
5: How do generative AI, deepfakes, microtargeting, and automated persuasion affect electoral integrity?
1: AI-driven campaigning, microtargeting and predictive analytics
2: AI-enhanced voting advice applications and electoral behaviour
3: Generative AI, automated content and political persuasion
4: Synthetic parties, AI candidates and autonomous political agents
5: Populist leaders, parties and AI-based campaigning
6: AI, electoral integrity, transparency and accountability
7: AI governance, regulation and democratic institutions
8: Digital electioneering, democratic resilience and backsliding
