The Artificial Citizens’ Assembly: Can AI Deliberate?

Can artificial intelligence debate, disagree, and change its mind like humans do? This study explores whether AI can simulate a citizens’ assembly, where people with different backgrounds and opinions come together to discuss political issues. We developed a structured AI simulation based on theories of deliberative democracy, translating principles such as exchanging arguments, considering different perspectives, and reconsidering opinions into a step-by-step process. We tested it using a Swiss climate referendum, comparing the results with unstructured AI discussions and a real citizens’ assembly. The findings show that AI discussions guided by deliberative theory produce more coherent and higher-quality exchanges, while preserving different viewpoints. However, AI still struggles to reproduce the depth of reasoning and real-life experiences that people bring to democratic discussions. The study suggests that AI cannot replace human deliberation, but it could help researchers and policymakers explore different perspectives and design better democratic processes.

link.growkudos.com

Deliberation Within AI: A Reproducible Pipeline for Multi-Agent Deliberation Simulation | Digital Government: Research and Practice

Recent advances in generative AI have renewed interest in whether large language models can simulate aspects of public deliberation. Current deliberation simulations remain methodologically fragile: f...

dl.acm.org

Can AI Reason Like Humans on Complex Problems?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can produce answers that sound convincing and reasonable. But sounding reasonable is not the same as reasoning well. We compared 60 AI models with citizens who deliberated on complex public issues by exchanging reasons, considering different viewpoints, and reflecting on their positions. We asked whether AI connects reasons to decisions in the same structured way people do after deliberation. Most models did not. Their answers often sounded persuasive, but the reasons they gave were not consistently connected to their conclusions. This gap between sounding reasonable and reasoning coherently matters as AI is increasingly used to support decisions on complex public issues. Our findings show that a plausible answer is not necessarily a well-reasoned one. AI may therefore be more useful for helping people explore and compare different arguments than for making complex judgments on their behalf

link.growkudos.com

Plausible nonsense and deliberative reasoning: Benchmarking LLMs against human judgment | PNAS

Large Language Models (LLMs) are entering democratic contexts as instruments of governance, where the challenges at hand are ill-structured, marked...

pnas.org

Plausible nonsense and deliberative reasoning: Benchmarking LLMs against human judgment | PNAS

Large Language Models (LLMs) are entering democratic contexts as instruments of governance, where the challenges at hand are ill-structured, marked...

pnas.org

Institutional configurations and deliberative innovation: A comparative analysis of minipublic adoption across advanced democracies | European Political Science | Cambridge Core

Institutional configurations and deliberative innovation: A comparative analysis of minipublic adoption across advanced democracies

cambridge.org

Mapping discourses through Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components - Francesco Veri, 2025

This article proposes a methodological framework that combines a Q-concourse questionnaire with Multiple Factor Analysis and Hierarchical Clustering on Principa...

journals.sagepub.com

Deliberative reason and the effect of minipublic configurations | European Political Science Review | Cambridge Core

Deliberative reason and the effect of minipublic configurations

cambridge.org

Migration discourses from the radical right: Mapping and testing potential for political mobilization

Radical right-wing groups are often linked to conspiratorial beliefs that can fuel political extremism but understanding how these beliefs translate into real-world action remains a challenge, as the....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Migration discourses from the radical right: Mapping and testing potential for political mobilization

Radical right-wing groups are often linked to conspiratorial beliefs that can fuel political extremism but understanding how these beliefs translate into real-world action remains a challenge, as the...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com