Co-Designing Participatory Tools for a New Age: A Proposal for Combining Collective and Artificial Intelligences

2. Introducing Ai In Participatory Decision-Making Processes

Political sociology often distinguishes three decision-making models in democratic regimes: representative, participatory, and technocratic (Bengtsson & Christensen, 2014). The major difference between them resides in the actors responsible for the decision making. Thus, in the representative model, a group of elected politicians are in charge of making decisions, whereas that is the responsibility of citizens and experts in the participatory and technocratic models, respectively. Recent public opinion research argues that most citizens prefer decision-making processes that involve both elected politicians and ordinary people; however, people believe that decisions are solely taken by elected politicians (Allen et al. 2015; Font et al. 2015, 2017).