In 2024, over 75% of the global population has been called to the polls to participate in a democratic election. When voting, citizens express personal, private and obinion-laden decisions. In such situations, AI-based systems are claimed to negatively impact democratic processes and access to information through their ability to facilitate misinformation campaigns run by bot farms on social media, to profile voters and nudge them toward a certain decision as well as facilitating election fraud and foreign interference offline. Nevertheless, AI also has the potential to contribute to participatory decision making and promote democratic processes by allowing those who govern to know more about those who are governed..
This week’s post brings us a positive example of AI used for good governance in South Africa. It is written by Karen Willenberg, a seasoned regulatory lawyer who has worked in the area of broadcasting regulation across the African continent. After she left her in-house counsel role to focus on providing AI tools for improving governance on the African continent, she founded a start-up called Neith, which uses AI to deliver analytics and data insights in public participation processes. Here is what she reports to our global community.
This year, South Africa celebrated 30 years of democracy and held its seventh democratic election since the birth of constitutional democracy in 1994. Most of you will be familiar with the country’s dark history, one in which the majority of people were completely excluded from participating in decisions that affected their lives. Because of this past, the right to participate in the making of laws is central to our democratic project.
Today, every citizen has the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa requires the government to ensure public participation in law-making processes and our courts have repeatedly emphasised the importance of participation as a safeguard to ensure that the interests of the public are not neglected or disregarded. As in many other democratic countries, significant resources are devoted to creating opportunities for the public to participate in decision making.
But there is a problem hiding in plain sight. In public participation processes, decision makers are regularly inundated with massive volumes of written submissions and yet, relatively little time is spent understanding precisely how submissions from the public are being dealt with. The reality is that engaging with public comments in a meaningful way is a major practical challenge, because of the volume of data involved - it is not uncommon that several thousands or even hundreds of thousands of written submissions are received. In formal consultation or participation processes, significant time and resources are required simply to capture and document the submissions received, let alone evaluate and respond. In my work in broadcasting regulation on the African continent, I have seen varying degrees of effort applied to making sense of the content of these submissions – from outright disregard, to some valiant attempts at summarisation in a spreadsheet. All too frequently, litigation exposes serious cracks in the edifice of public participation. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that, however heroically wielded, current mechanisms for evaluating public feedback are no longer appropriate for the pace and scale of public decision making. If governments are serious about legitimacy, transparency and accountability in their decision making, then one point for meaningful intervention would be finding better tools for engaging with the public at scale.
This is a real-world problem that AI is uniquely suited to solve. When it comes to quickly and accurately processing large volumes of data, AI technology vastly outperforms human beings. How does any public official digest the diverse perspectives expressed in thousands of written submissions on a new piece of legislation and, more importantly, how is their decision making impacted by the inability to make sense of this volume of data? We are familiar with the maxim that “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” and we understand that human beings have certain cognitive limits which impede our ability to deal with massive volumes of data. We should be thinking more seriously about the implications of these limitations for public decision making and exploring technologies that can augment decision making capacity.
As governments around the world consider how AI can help them better serve their citizens, the use of AI technology in public consultation processes can enhance decision making capacity to meaningfully advance the pace, scale and quality of public decision making.
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Silvia A. Carretta and Dina Blikshteyn
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