Artificial Intelligence and Democracy: Campaigns, Elections, Movements, and Deliberation

This chapter examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming four domains of democratic practice: political campaigns, election administration, social movements, and citizen deliberation. Using a task-based framework from labor economics, we analyze which political functions AI can substitute for, leave unchanged, or augment. In campaigns, AI accelerates content production and demonstrates persuasive capabilities exceeding traditional methods. In election administration, adoption remains limited, with AI’s tendency toward hallucination restricting its use to back-office tasks. For social movements, AI enables mobilization tools in hostile environments. In citizen deliberation, pioneering applications – Taiwan’s vTaiwan and Google DeepMind’s Habermas Machine – use AI to facilitate large-scale deliberation. We identify tensions between AI’s capacity to expand participation and the risks of centralizing control among platforms and well-resourced actors. We emphasize that AI’s democratic impact depends upon organizational integration of these technologies, competitive dynamics, regulation, and political leadership rather than technological capabilities alone.