We Need New Democratic Infrastructures for the Age of AI

Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science · Göttingen The task of this Working Group on Informational Democracy is to examine the changing nature, place and prospect of information in today's and tomorrow's democratic systems. Their work will lay the foundations for a new democratic theory and practice.

The Vision

Democracy as a Social Technology

We treat democracy as a "social technology" — a scalable set of instruments, infrastructures, and institutions designed to manage collective intelligence, resolve conflicts, and distribute power. What it runs on is information: produced, stored, circulated, and now algorithmically generated.

Democracy does not merely require information as an input. It depends on a functioning epistemic infrastructure: shared mechanisms for producing, evaluating, and distributing knowledge across a polity. Political economy is inseparable from this question — ownership and control of the infrastructure are not secondary to the inquiry but central to it. That infrastructure is now being rebuilt. Whether citizens or platforms own the systems through which a society comes to know itself is not a technical question. It is a constitutional one. This working group exists to ask it seriously, and to begin sketching the answer.

Read the Working Note → Read the Concept Note →

Substack

The Provocations

The Substack "Informational Democracy" is the public knowledge layer of the project. Each member starts from a distinct Provocation and develops the arc of the argument in three essays, moving from Grounding to Visioning to Demonstrating.

Read on Substack ↗

The Organizers

Societies need democratically governed infrastructures for collective sense-making

The organizers come from different backgrounds, academia, media, institutional innovation. They share the ambition to think about technology in a way that acknowledges the challenges while moving boldly into the constructive space to explore how a new version of democratic institutions could look like.