Democratic Values and Emerging Technologies in Political Theory

This Section aims to examine themes and topics at the intersection(s) between democratic theory, the philosophy of technology, and value theory. One of the central tasks that liberal democratic theorists often profess is that of “probing the limits of practicable political possibility” (Rawls, J. 2003. Justice as Fairness, HUP: 4). This task demands imagining new institutions and policies that are both valuable in themselves and practically well-placed to garner political support. Democratic theorists have been comparatively less invested in the task of probing the limits of technological, rather than exclusively political possibility, and slower to reflect on the normative import that technology has for the pursuit and realization of central democratic values. This risks generating an important, albeit avoidable, theoretical gap. We live at a time when emerging and rapidly proliferating technologies – most notably, machine learning, online and/or automated content curation, digital currency, distributed ledger technologies, predictive algorithms, large language models, augmented and/or virtual reality, nanotechnology and synthetic biology – create new challenges and opportunities for the protection and promotion of democratic values. This Section invites reflection on the implications of such developments for democratic values such as equality, freedom, solidarity, publicity, inclusivity, deliberation, diversity, representation, collective autonomy, and self-determination. The section welcomes panel and paper contributions in applied political theory that address the normative implications that emerging technologies have for these democratic values or contributions that develop first-order theories about the nature of democratic value(s), with potential implications for rethinking the relation between democracy and technology, or the role of technology within political theory more generally. Contributions in applied political theory could cover domains such as elections, economic and workplace policies, foreign policy and international relations, healthcare, welfare, education, and tap into broad understandings and interpretations of emerging technologies. First-order political theory contributions can offer novel normative or critical insights about standardly theorized democratic values (eg, equality or freedom) or advance insights and arguments about relatively under-explored democratic values (eg, resilience or efficiency). We invite proposals from all traditions and subfields in political theory and political philosophy that analyze and reflect on themes and topics including, but not limited to, the following: • The relation between democratic values such as sovereignty and collective self-determination and the globalized scope and/or private ownership of AI technologies; • The normative impact and import of digital curation and/or online platform design for the fair value of political freedoms and the political ethics of elections; • The normative implications that emerging technologies such as drones, augmented or virtual reality have on democratic theories of war and the values and principles relevant for the regulation of international, as well as domestic conflict; • The conceptual and normative ramifications of large language model applications and/or new social media for linguistic justice, free speech and linguistic diversity, as well as more broadly political diversity within multilingual democracies and/or immigrant societies; • The ethics and politics of predictive algorithms, synthetic biology or nanotechnology in high-stakes policies such as criminal justice, healthcare, warfare, and welfare. After deliberation within the Steering Committee of the ECPR Standing Group on Political Theory and consultation with members of our group, at this stage we propose to convene and have already secured five panels on a variety of thematically relevant topics. We also welcome additional submissions of panels and/or papers (up to a total of ten panels). Panel 1: AI and Democracy Beyond Borders: Normative Perspectives. Chair: Ted Lechterman (IE University). Co-chair: Salla Westerstrand (Turku). Other proposed speakers: Luise Müller (FU Berlin), Markus Furendal (Stockholm University), Lukas Schmid (GU Frankfurt). This panel considers the potential of AI to enhance and/or undermine democratic processes, the international governance of AI, and the tensions between global technological advancement and local democratic control. Panel 2: Digitalization of Work and the Prospects of Democratizing the Economy. Chair: Ugur Aytac (Utrecht). Co-chair: Tatiana Llaguno (Groningen). Other proposed speakers: James Muldoon (Essex), Alina Utrata (Oxford), Tim Christiaens (Tilburg). This panel examines how data harvesting, the use of AI for automation, and surveillance technologies all radically reshape how we should understand and evaluate the fundamental parameters of capitalist economies, workers’ individual and collective agency, and the balance of economic and political power in labor markets. Panel 3: Free Speech, Social Media and Deliberation. Chair: Jonathan Seglow (Royal Holloway). Co-chair: Corrado Fumagalli (Genoa). Other proposed speakers: Suzanne Whitten (QUB), Leonie Smith (Lancaster), William Chan (Cambridge), Jeff Howard (UCL). This panel features debates about the normative ramifications of digital social media practices. It includes questions such as the value of (free) speech in the context of limited (online) audiences, the value of democratic engagement as mediated by specific social media algorithms, the regulation of privately owned media corporations, and the impact of Gen-AI technologies on deliberative practices. Panel 4: Multilingual Democracies, Linguistic Justice and Technology. Chair: Andrew Shorten (Limerick). Co-chair: Yael Peled (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity). Other proposed speakers: Luis Cabrera (Griffith University), Anna Milioni (Université de Montréal), Seunghyun Song (Tilburg University). This panel explores normative issues raised by digital and online technologies for the representation and accessibility of minority languages online, the challenges of digitisation for Indigenous and non-Western languages and scripts, and the politics of machine translation practices. Panel 5: Deliberative and Voting Rules & Technologies: Epistemic Democracy Perspectives. Chair: Suzanne Bloks (LSE). Co-chair: Andrei Poama (Leiden). Other proposed speakers: Claudia Landwehr (Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz), Juliette Roussin (Laval University), Kai Spiekermann (LSE). This panel explores the multifaceted impact of online technologies and platform curation practices on the epistemic and democratic norms that should guide political decision-making practices, in particular voting and deliberation. Section Chair: Andrei Poama is Lecturer in Political Philosophy and Public Policy Ethics at Leiden University, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the ECPR Standing Group on Political Theory. Section Co-Chair: Jonathan Seglow is Reader in Political Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London and a member of the Steering Committee of the ECPR Standing Group on Political Theory.