Peer-reviewed research
Collaborative research programs dedicated to investigate the relations between technology and civic engagement and other challenges around concepts like citizenship, participation, and democracy.
The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence
Our findings suggest that the persuasive power of current and near-future AI is likely to stem less from model scale or personalization and more from post-training and prompting techniques that mobili...
Global energy sector methane emissions estimated by using facility-level satellite observations
Global energy sector methane emissions estimated by using facility-level satellite observations
Politically Invisible in America
Study finds at least 23% of the US population isn't included in the Voter File
Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing
Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing
Disentangling participation in online political discussions with a collective field experiment
These findings support preference- and incentive-based accounts of participation but suggest that light-touch interventions are unlikely to bridge participation gaps, let alone polarization.
TRIED: Truly Innovative and Effective AI Detection Benchmark
a new framework for evaluating detection tools based on their real-world impact and capacity for innovation
Lessons from a Climate Citizens’ Assembly Kawasaki, Japan
The Climate Citizens’ Assembly Kawasaki (CCAK) was implemented in mid-2021 to produce recommendations for the local government to incorporate into its basic climate plan.
“News on the Street”: An Action Research Case Study of Embodied Live Journalism in an Urban Public Space
As journalists look for different ways to tell stories and rebuild communities, this paper details an action research approach to a unique live journalism event in a public space.
Making Sense of Open Government: A Conceptual Framework and Ideas for Future Research | Perspectives on Public Management and Governance
"[T]his article proposes an open government framework that integrates multiple concepts related to open government and categorizes them as either constitutive components or potential results"
Eliciting People’s First-Order Concerns: Text Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Questions
Comparing traditionally structured survey questions vs. the benefits of open-ended survey questions combined with text analysis to allow a wider range of responses.
AI and Cybersecurity in the Lagos State Public Sector: Opportunities and Risks
AI technologies can empower public agencies by enabling real-time network monitoring, predictive analytics for risk prevention, and automated responses to cyber incidents
Indicator Academic library
This is a regularly updated collection of academic studies and industry reports about digital deception. It currently includes short descriptions of 55 academic studies and systematic reports.
Bad Vaxx
Level up your defenses! Learn to build resistance against manipulation.
Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation
We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, (a) increases the perceived manipulativeness of misinformation about COVID-19, (b) improves people’s attitudinal certainty (confidence) in the...
The cranky uncle game—combining humor and gamification to build student resilience against climate misinformation
Combining humor and gamification to build student resilience against climate misinformation
Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation
We provide initial evidence that people’s ability to spot and resist misinformation improves after gameplay, irrespective of education, age, political ideology, and cognitive style.
Cranky Uncle
The Cranky Uncle game uses cartoons and critical thinking to fight misinformation.
Psychological inoculation improves resilience to and reduces willingness to share vaccine misinformation
Our findings suggest that a short, low-cost, gamified intervention can increase resilience to vaccine misinformation.
The Inscrutable Code? The Deficient Scrutiny Problem of Automated Government
This paper argues that automated decision-making in UK public administration lacks adequate scrutiny, and proposes regulatory safeguards through mandatory pre-deployment impact assessments and algorit...
Algorithmic Accountability in the UK - How FOIA Sheds Light on Automated Welfare
This study examines 51 Freedom of Information requests to reveal how the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions uses opaque data-driven fraud detection systems in welfare, highlighting the limited tran...
Public Encounters and Government Chatbots: When Servers Talk to Citizens
This paper examines emerging experiences with chatbots in government interactions, with a focus on exploring what public administration practitioners and scholars should expect from chatbots in public...
Institutional Pressures and Bureaucratic Responsiveness: Why Do Public Agencies Respond to Freedom of Information Requests?
"By conducting a national-scale field experiment among 949 provincial-level agencies in China....results show that legal regulative pressure and social normative pressure make agencies more likely to...
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Directory of Open Access Journals: Find open access journals & articles.
The uneven reach of the state: A novel approach to mapping local state presence
A machine learning model trains on geo-located survey data to predict state presence.
AI and the Future of Digital Public Squares
Here, we explore four applications of LLMs to improve digital public squares: collective dialogue systems, bridging systems, community moderation, and proof-of-humanity systems.
Improving Delivery of the Social Safety Net: The Role of Stigma
Article in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory by Jessica Lasky-Fink and Elizabeth Linos
Protests in the United States on Palestine and Israel, 2023–2024
Analyzes the size, rhetorical nature, and non-violent nature of the pro-Palestine protest wave, which it finds to be "the largest, most sustained US protests sparked by a foreign event" since their da...
Using publicly available satellite imagery and deep learning to understand economic well-being in Africa
Article in Nature by Christopher Yeh, Anthony Perez, Anne Driscoll, George Azzari, Zhongyi Tang, David Lobell, Stefano Ermon & Marshall Burke
Journal of Democracy
Focusing exclusively on democracy, the Journal monitors and analyzes democratic regimes and movements around the world.
AI in the Nonprofit Human Services: Distinguishing Between Hype, Harm, and Hope
Article in Human Service Organizations by Lauri Goldkind, Joy Ming, and Alex Fink
The Situate AI Guidebook: Co-Designing a Toolkit to Support Multi-Stakeholder Early-stage Deliberations Around Public Sector AI Proposals
By Anna Kawakami, Amanda Coston, Haiyi Zhu, Hoda Heidari, Kenneth Holstein
Prosocial Media
We propose an alternative platform model that the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. By E. Glen Weyl, Luke Thorburn, Emillie de Keulenaar, Jacob Mchangama, Divya Siddarth, Audrey Tang
Democratic AI is Possible. The Democracy Levels Framework Shows How It Might Work
In this paper, building on insights from the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, we provide a "Democracy Levels" framework for evaluating the degree to which decisions in a given domain are...
Reimagining Democracy for AI
By Aviv Ovadya
AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation (Habermas Machine)
Google DeepMind and Stanford researchers built the "Habermas Machine" and found that AI mediators generated more palatable summary statements of the discussions, as rated by participants, than human-w...
Softening Online Extremes Using Network Engineering
Online Technology as a Pathway for Citizen Deliberation and Depolarization
This article proposes, and presents results from, an online technology platform and a methodology, which can help depolarize sectors of society, with the specific application to the current divisive p...
Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People
Stanford + DeepMind study that used LLMs to simulate people with AI agents based on a 2-hour interview
More and Better! Diversifying electronic participation mechanisms and improving the online services offered by Portuguese municipalities
The 2023 edition of the “IPIC – Portuguese Municipal Councils’ Online Presence Index” series of studies presents the results of the evaluation of Portuguese municipal councils’ websites.
Baseline vulnerable road user injury risk in multiple U.S. dense urban driving environments
Waymo partnered with dashcam company Nexar to analyze 500 million miles of driving, including 335 crashes, to create the 'largest ever’ dataset of pedestrian and cyclist injuries
Pro-Democracy Organizing against Autocracy in the United States: A Strategic Assessment & Recommendations
A paper published in SSRN by Erica Chenoweth, Zoe Marks
Climate change psychological distress is associated with increased collective climate action in the U.S.
"Importantly, people experiencing distress are more likely to engage in collective action on climate change or express a willingness to do so, even when controlling for several correlates of environme...
Can digital humanitarian aid reach vulnerable populations in fragile states?
Evidence from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan shows that digital aid is a cost-effective, credible, and efficient way to reach vulnerable populations, in this case poor, tech-illiterate, female-headed...
Conspiracy Debunking Conversations
An open database of conversations ChatGPT had with people who believe in a variety of conspiracy theories, which can be filtered by the efficacy of the conversation in changing beliefs.
Empowering Indigenous Communities: Land Alienation in Tripura and Restoration through ICT Initiatives
Through a comprehensive analysis of various ICT projects, this study examines the success and challenges of using technology to protect and restore land rights.
The Impact and Opportunities of Generative AI in Fact-Checking
Paper by ROBERT WOLFE and TANUSHREE MITRA, University of Washington, United States
When 'doing ethics' meets public procurement of smart city technology – an Amsterdam case study
[A] multi-stakeholder co-design project – including a citizen panel – is an integral part of the process in which the service is designed and realized
Open Data on GitHub: Unlocking the Potential of AI
Academic analysis of open data on Github finds it's "one of the largest hosts of open data in the world and has experienced an accelerated growth of open data assets over the past four years."
#ISOJ
#GotaGoGama, which criticized Gotabaya's candidacy and highlighted human rights abuses.
Digitalization in Disaster Risk Reduction: The Use of Smartphones to Enhance the Safety of Informal Settlements in Iringa, Tanzania
The aim of this study was to assess the current use of smartphones by the masons of the informal settlements of Iringa, Tanzania, and to identify pathways for improving their construction practices.