Nardine Alnemr

While algorithms largely isolate publics in bubbles of misinformation and conspiracy theories, online spaces and communication enable an opportunity for a connected global public sphere. For deliberative democrats, their concerns over algorithmic harms pertain to how algorithms promote exclusion and political polarization, undermine the epistemic quality of public deliberation by disseminating misinformation, and compromise internal reflection by amplifying particular discourses through bots. However valid these concerns are, focusing on them alone does not offer a holistic theory of deliberative democracy now that we live in a global, connected and algorithmic society. In this article, I argue that deliberative democracy should not only focus on institutional reform to address algorithmic harms, but also emphasize locating the creative political agency of everyday citizens to contest these harms. I recast the three algorithmic harms deliberative democrats identified as three ways ordinary citizens can contest algorithms and, in so doing, contribute to building the polity’s deliberative capacity necessary to democratize our algorithmic society.

Recent theories of democratic representation push beyond 'minimalist' notions that only rely on periodic elections to connect officials and constituents. For example, Jane Mansbridge (2019) calls for 'recursive representation', which seeks ongoing, two-way interaction between representatives and their constituents. Given the scale and complexity of modern representative democracies, how can such ambitious proposals be translated into practice? We analyze two Deliberative Town Halls (DTHs) convened with a Federal Member of Australian Parliament in 2020 to discuss a complex issue, mitochondrial donation, ahead of a parliamentary debate and conscience vote on this issue. Drawing on interviews with participants, we argue that democratic innovations such as DTHs can contribute to realizing recursive representation when three criteria are met: authenticity, inclusion, and impact. We discuss the significance of each criterion and the role of DTHs in advancing recursive representation in a parliamentary system.

Algorithms are used to calculate and govern varying aspects of public life for efficient use of the vast data available about citizens. Assuming that algorithms are neutral and efficient in data-based decision making, algorithms are used in areas such as criminal justice and welfare. This has ramifications on the ideal of democratic self-government as algorithmic decisions are made without democratic deliberation, scrutiny or justification. In the book Democracy without Shortcuts, Cristina Lafont argued against “shortcutting” democratic self-government. Lafont’s critique of shortcuts turns to problematise taken-for-granted practices in democracies that bypass citizen inclusion and equality in authoring decisions governing public life. In this article, I extend Lafont’s argument to another shortcut: the algocratic shortcut. The democratic harms attributable to the algocratic shortcut include diminishing the role of voice in politics and reducing opportunities for civic engagement. In this article, I define the algocratic shortcut and discuss the democratic harms of this shortcut, its relation to other shortcuts to democracy and the limitations of using shortcuts to remedy algocratic harms. Finally, I reflect on remedy through “aspirational deliberation”.

There are many ways of amplifying the voices of the poor in today's multimedia saturated societies. In this article, we argue that the dominant portrayals of poverty in the media privilege voices that exclude the poor from authentic and consequential deliberations that affect their lives. We make a case for amplifying the poor's deliberative agency - the performance of political justification in the public sphere - when creating media content. Through two illustrative examples, we demonstrate that amplifying the poor's deliberative agency is both normatively desirable and politically possible. We begin with the case of Brazil where we discuss how slow journalism drew attention to the diversity of the poor's political claims about a mining disaster, followed by the case of citizen journalism in Lebanon where a protest movement shifted the dominant arguments about the garbage crisis from an issue of the dirty poor to an issue of the corrupt elite. Through these examples, this article makes a normative case for portraying poor communities as democratic agents who are bearers of ideas, reasons, justifications, and aspirations. We argue that this portrayal is essential for promoting virtues of deliberative democracy - inclusiveness, pluralistic reason-giving, and reflexivity - that are very much needed in contemporary times.

Challenges in attaining deliberative democratic ideals - such as inclusion, authenticity and consequentiality - in wider political systems have driven the development of artificially-designed citizen deliberation. These designed deliberations, however, are expert-driven. Whereas they may achieve 'deliberativeness', their design and implementation are undemocratic and limit deliberative democracy's emancipatory goals. This is relevant in respect to the role of facilitation. In online deliberation, algorithms and artificial actors replace the central role of human facilitators. The detachment of such designed settings from wider contexts is particularly troubling from a democratic perspective. Digital technologies in online deliberation are not developed in a manner consistent with democratic ideals and are not being amenable to scrutiny by citizens. I discuss the theoretical and the practical blind spots of algorithmic facilitation. Based on these, I present recommendations to democratise the design and implementation of online deliberation with a focus on chatbots as facilitators.