Digital Democracy

digital democracy

Digital Democracy - relating to the question of how democracy can be upgraded digitally - is an important, inter-disciplinary research topic that cuts across many of our projects.

This webpage gives you a quick overview of some of our most significant related publications, which span from computational social science to data and complexity science, from network to game theory, from agent-based to machine learning-based modeling, from co-creation to co-evolution, from collective intelligence to participatory action, from resilience to sustainability, and from human rights to ethics.

For related work, also see the webpages of the teams of external page Prof. Regula Hänggli and external page Prof. Evangelos Pournaras.

To access a paper, please click the figure that comes up when you click the respective title.

collective — Simulated utility for majority (blue) and minority (red) in all four models, shown over time. Solid lines represent the mean, while the shaded area represents the standard deviation.

Shiny — Overview of greenR: Its core is an R package filled with intuitive high-level functions, including a function to launch the RShiny application.

LLM — Overview of the LLM voting experimental setup.

Digital Voting — Change in perceived trustworthiness of aggregation methods in different explanation treatment groups.

legitimacy — Legitimacy Ratings by Context (Left) and Inconsistency (Right).

votelab architecture — Architecture of VoteLab.

digital twins — The role of complexity for digital twins of cities.

traffic flow — Schematic of our proposed system.

co-creation — Co-creation methodology used in “Know the Air You Breathe” initiative.

network_diversity — Removing links to highly connected individuals may increase the structural diversity index.

misinfo_twitter — Factors influencing the spread of mis- and disinformation. Our study examines the impact of daylight, time of day, human diurnal activity, affiliation to chronotype, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

democracy by design — Venn diagram depicting the specific topics addressed in this work, highlighting in particular the areas of digital governance, value-sensitive design, and participatory democracy.

participatory resilience — From a traditional perspective, system performance evolves as different events happen. At t0, a rare disruptive event is assumed to occur. Afterwards, the system can collapse or recover from the shock. At the same time, this bouncing reaction of the system can result in an extended degradation of functionality (degraded recovery), full recovery (sometimes called “stability”), or even in an increased performance of the system (“anti-fragility”). Alternatively, as we argue in this review, participation and co-evolutionary approaches can lead to an increasing resilience also in the absence of shocks and crises. The co-evolutionary curve may, however, also show “evolutionary jumps”, which would be related with disruptive innovations and systemic change.

Ethics — Proposed workflow for data management and privacy protection.

vsd — An outline and comparison of the proposed value-sensitive, preference-based decision-support process. (a) A consumer’s localization at Retailer A. The red dots on the map denote the product categories in close proximity. (b) Presenting the product categories in close proximity to the consumer. (c) Product ratings close to 10 denote better matching of the product to the consumer’s sustainability preferences. (d) Comparison of the proposed value-oriented, preference-based design approach with mainstream decision-support shopping assistants.

Fin4 — Rewarding positive actions is the core of Finance 4.0.

Social bitcoin — Illustration of the incentive to mine Social Bitcoins.

next civilization

Self-regulate — A self-regulatory framework for supply–demand systems.

information_sharing — Privacy-preserving participatory social sensing as a supply-demand system.

iot — Decentralized in-network data aggregation for the Internet of Things.

war rooms to peace rooms

digital democracy

democracy-1

digital enlightment

falling walls

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participatory platform — Conceiving the Global Participatory Platform as an Information Ecosystem.

CSH

tech

Persönlichkeit im Visier: Die Konvergenz von Biologie und Computertechnologie könnte überaus sensible Daten verfügbar machen. Bild: by-studio / AdobeStock

magazine

ETH

democracy

climate city cup

data

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Contact

Prof. Dr. Dirk Helbing

Full Professor at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences

Computational Social Science
Stampfenbachstrasse 48
8092 Zürich
Switzerland