Digital Technologies and Democratic Innovations: Ambiguities of Participation and Manipulation

Digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic systems are reshaping the conditions under which democratic politics unfolds. These tools promise to broaden participation, enhance deliberation, and support decision-making, yet they also carry risks of manipulation, misinformation, surveillance, and exclusion. Their impact is therefore profoundly ambiguous: technologies can strengthen democratic agency, but they can equally undermine trust, transparency, and legitimacy. Calls for regulation and governance of digital technologies have become increasingly louder from two camps. For scholars of democratic innovations, technologies promise new tools for participation, deliberation, and collective decision-making. For scholars of politics and technology, these same tools expose shifting power dynamics, regulatory challenges, and emerging forms of manipulation. This collaborative section seeks to bridge these perspectives to ensure approaches to technological advancement as a fundamentally socio-political process: digital infrastructures do not merely enable new forms of participation, they actively shape who can take part and who can’t, how preferences are formed, and which political actors gain or lose influence. This collaborative section encourages a nuanced approach to these issues, inviting papers that examine how technologies interact with governance systems while highlighting the political choices, power relations, and normative tensions embedded in socio-technical developments. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions that clarify how democracy and public governance are being reimagined, contested, and transformed in an era of pervasive digital mediation. In particular, we will welcome contributions that address: · How institutional contexts, political cultures, and socio-economic inequalities condition the adoption and effects of digital technologies. · Promises and limits of AI and big data for citizen participation, agenda-setting, and deliberation. · Manipulation, bias, and exclusion in algorithmic governance, and their implications for democracy. · Institutional and political economy perspectives, exploring how states, parties, civil society, and private technology companies shape digital democratic innovations. · Comparative and cross-national analyses of adoption, resistance, and contestation of digital tools in governance. · Conceptual innovation, extending frameworks of legitimacy, representation, and democratic agency to the algorithmic age.