How can we reconcile the need for good deliberation with the demand for more democratic participation? This workshop invites students, scholars, and practitioners to explore the challenges and possibilities of digital democracy and online deliberation processes.
- Date
- Thursday 27 Mar 2025, 09:00 - 18:00
- Type
- Workshop
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- 1-12
- Space
- Sanders Building
- Ticket information
Participation is free of charge, but spots are limited. If you’d like to attend, please email Nicolien Janssens at janssens@esphil.eur.nl with the subject: “Participation: ENCODE Workshop”. (Max. 20 participants)
Please indicate in your email if you would also like to join the dinner at 18:00 (at your own expense).
Workshop Description
In deliberative democracy, a central challenge arises from the conflict between two essential conditions for democratic legitimacy: deliberation on one side and mass participation on the other. Indeed, according to deliberative democratic theory, collective decisions are legitimate when they result from deliberation among all those affected by the decision. When the decision affects large groups of people, this necessitates mass participation. At the same time, it is argued that proper deliberation works best in small groups.
Can transitioning deliberation online alleviate this problem? If so, how do we design deliberation online? This workshop aims to provide insight into the various challenges and questions that arise when designing online deliberation and mass participation. We aim to shed light on the topic from philosophical, computational, and practical angles.
The workshop is supported by the NWO Vidi ENCODE project (Explicating the Norms of Collective Deliberation), hosted at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and is led by associate professor Frederik Van De Putte.
Speakers
The workshop features talks by:
- Dannica Fleuss – a.o. University of Nairobi & Heidelberg University
- Dennis Frieß – Düsseldorfer Institut für Internet und Demokratie (DIID)
- Anna Mikhaylovskaya – University of Groningen
- Michaël Grauwde – Delft University of Technology
- Feline Lindeboom – University of Groningen
Schedule
- 10:30 - 11:30 - Dennis Frieß
- 11:30 - 11:45 - Coffee break
- 11:45 - 12:30 - Anna Mikhaylovskaya
- 12:30 - 1:30 - Lunch break
- 1:30 - 2:30 - Dannica Fleuss
- 2:30 - 2:45 - Coffee break
- 2:45 - 3:30 - Feline Lindeboom
- 3:30 - 3:45 - Coffee break
- 3:45 - 4:30 - Michaël Grauwde
- 6:00 - Dinner
Abstracts
Dennis Friess - Düsseldorfer Institut für Internet und Demokratie
Title & Abstract - TBA
Anna Mikhaylovskaya - University of Groningen
Title - Nurturing Virtues with Digital Democratic Innovations
Abstract - Digital democratic innovations (DDIs) have been widely discussed as a promising way of engaging citizens in political decision-making. Extensive research has focused on designing DDIs that are deliberative, inclusive, and representative. However, little attention has been paid to DDIs’ potential for nurturing individual democratic virtues. Our paper aims to address this gap. We argue that the cultivation of democratic virtues should play a more central role when it comes to digital citizen participation. Specifically, we explore how deliberative DDIs can help participants develop virtuous qualities. Beyond providing a more participatory decision-making mechanism, DDIs should be seen as an opportunity for individuals to cultivate virtues and become better citizens. We distinguish between epistemic and moral virtues, and explore how DDIs can nurture them in ways distinct from other forms of deliberative democratic innovations. To this end, we propose practical design features for DDI that could facilitate the cultivation of both epistemic and moral virtues.
Dannica Fleuss - University of Nairobi, Heidelberg University (a.o.)
Title & Abstract - TBA
Feline Lindeboom - University of Groningen
Title - A voice for minorities: diversity in approval based committee elections under incomplete or inaccurate information.
Abstract - We study diversity in approval based committee elections with incomplete and/or inaccurate information. As standard in the literature on multi-winner voting, we define diversity according to the maximum coverage problem, which is known to be NP-complete, with a best attainable polynomial time approximation ratio of 1-1/e. In the incomplete information model, voters vote on only a small portion of the candidates. We suggest a greedy algorithm and a local search algorithm that query voters and use the query responses to approximate the total population's opinion. For both algorithms, we prove an upper bound on the number of queries required to get a close to 1-1/e -approximate solution with high probability. We also provide a lower bound for the query complexity of non-adaptive algorithms in this setting. In the inaccurate information setting, voters' answers are corrupted with a probability p in (0,1/2). We provide both an upper and a lower bound for the number of queries required to attain a 1-1/e approximate solution with high probability. Finally, using real data from Polis, we see that our algorithms perform better than the theory suggests, both with incomplete and inaccurate information.
Michaël Grauwde – Delft University of Technology
Title & Abstract - TBA
