Automatic transcription of the interview with Graham Wetherall-Grujić, it may contain errors.

Alessandro Oppo: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovator Podcast. Our guest today is Graham Wetherall-Grujić. Thank you for your time.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Hi Alex. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Alessandro Oppo: As a first question, I'd like to ask you something about your background and also maybe what you're researching.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Sure. Maybe to start with what I'm doing right now: I'm a senior researcher at the Innovation and Politics Institute, where I specialize in the intersection between technology and democracy. This includes things like digital citizen participation, but also questions like open data, electronic voting, and the way that AI is used by governments. There's a whole range of ways in which tech and democracy are interacting, and it's expanding very rapidly. Part of my job at the moment is to keep an overview of that.

As to my background, I spent a long time in the academic world, first studying political theory. Actually, at a time I would say where interest in democracy wasn't very strong in that field. I think there was a consensus that democracy as we knew it at the time was relatively stable, and there were people calling for more radical forms of democracy, but I would say there was more of a sense of complacency around the issue than there is today.

I then went on to study and teach philosophy. I was very interested in the background questions behind the political theory and really getting to the bottom of the problem. I spent some time involved in very theoretical conversations and engaging with these questions.

Then around four years ago, I left the academic world and got this job at the Innovation and Politics Institute, which was very eye-opening for me because it was a big leap from the theoretical world into a very practical world. I joined the team initially as an editor where I was writing up reports and articles on best practices in democratic innovation from around Europe. But I was also talking to the people who were really running these projects in cities all around Europe. Some of them were mayors, some of them were people working for administrations or NGOs. But all of them were taking a very hands-on approach to democracy, which was very exciting for me.

Alessandro Oppo: What is democracy? It's a word that we always talk about—democracy.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: This is a big question. As I said, I've spent the last few years interviewing people who really are doing the hands-on work, and I have a lot of respect for them. I think you can spend much too long talking about theories and not getting on with the practice of this stuff. I have the highest level of respect for people who are out there working in communities to really improve the acceptance of democracy among the public, because it's such an issue at the moment.

Having said that, I think having some kind of theoretical framework in view is useful. Sometimes I think there is a little bit of a lack of that. I think, especially in the tech world, there can be a tendency to confuse democracy just with choice—just with the idea that we should be giving the public a choice. There's also a tendency to conflate it sometimes with collective intelligence. I think that's a very important strand of what democracy can be and what it can do, but I don't think it's sufficient as a definition of democracy.

I suppose I would go back to the roots of the word and say that it's about giving power to people. It's about government by the people and for the people. If you look at what is going on in the United States today, but also in Europe today, I think you can see how that is floundering in various respects.

First of all, because people feel disconnected from politics—they don't feel that they have any power. But second, and I don't think we talk about this enough, governments don't have as much power as they used to have either. The governments that we're putting out there to represent us don't feel empowered to make decisions on a big range of important questions. A lot of political power is being shifted to, for example, big tech, who are taking more and more decisions on behalf of everybody and who have an awful lot of influence in shaping the legislation around these technologies.

I think keeping in mind this question of power and making sure that we're not just saying we need to give people more and more choice—actually, that's a word I associate a little bit with the neoliberal paradigm. Making sure that choice actually has an impact is a real problem. I think one of the frustrations people have with democracy right now is that sense that they are being given perhaps new mechanisms for choice, but the footprint of those choices is vanishingly small.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm thinking about how to give power to the people, like maybe using some civic tech software or platform. And also, what is power? That is another big question.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Yes, that's a huge question. Perhaps while I think about that one, to start with the first question: a lot of my work over the last few years has been to study different digital platforms for participation. Whether you think about things like participatory budgets that cities are running, or you think about large-scale consultation processes—and I mean, we should consider the offline ones as well, things like mini publics and citizens' assemblies. Some of these have semi-successfully migrated online.

There's also consultation platforms like Polis, which was used extensively during the vTaiwan movement, which is still going. It grew out of the Sunflower demonstrations as a new way of structuring conversations between citizens. Perhaps the Taiwan example is an interesting one. It was used to resolve a dispute when Uber first started deploying drivers in Taiwan. It was used to resolve a dispute between the taxi drivers and the Uber drivers and the local population. It provided a way of structuring a conversation that's very different from social media ranking algorithms, which encourage conflict. It's really based on an algorithm that helps build consensus among people. Hopefully that gives some way to answering the first part of the question.

Alessandro Oppo: I was thinking about power because in Italian it's "potere," and it's also something like a potential—the potentiality of doing something. I really like this because it means that we have power also if we are not presidents, also if we are not the king of a country, but we have a lot of power.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Yeah. I like that very much. I didn't know that it's the same word—potency would be the English equivalent. This idea of potential—one of the things I think that's gone wrong, actually, is that people feel that potential impact on politics is very narrow right now.

For a long time, there's been a consensus on a broad range of issues. If you think about what's going on in the housing market, for example, but more broadly on these big economic questions, there hasn't been a big range of choice through traditional representative democracy mechanisms, through voting for parties. There's been a broad consensus. And so the potential to have an impact on these issues that affect us all has become very reduced.

On the one hand, I think people see the narrowing potential of traditional democratic decision-making. But the flip side of that, which you just alluded to, is the potential for alternative mechanisms of exercising political power. And there I think more about civil society movements or grassroots movements, which look at formulating discussions and consensus through non-traditional means.

I mentioned the Sunflower movement, but I think also in Spain after the anti-austerity movement, you had this vast movement which fed into the creation of new models of citizen engagement. I'm thinking partly through the party structure of Podemos, which tried to open up more to its membership and to allow the membership to shape their policies a little more, with varying success, it has to be said. But also in Barcelona, where the Decidim platform was launched—another digital participation platform—and where the newly elected mayor Ada Colau tried to gather up the energy that came through that grassroots movement and channel that into her plan for the city over the next four years.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah. Also the changes that we can do. As you said, I was thinking about personal power—the fact that I can do something, I can call you, you can call me, and this is a small power. It's something that we can do, but a lot of times we don't do it. Or we can send a mail to the mayor saying that we don't agree about certain things, but most of the people don't do it, also if they have the power.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Yeah. But I think there's also a sense that one of the things that's changed is people get the sense that the mayor doesn't necessarily have that much power to do things about these issues either. Or if we think—if we come back to the question of big tech—there can be a sense that Europe has been making serious efforts to regulate what's going on in social media and now with the hype around AI.

But I think a lot of people are aware that to an extent they have to cater to patterns of power that are beyond their control. Big tech wields a lot of power. And now with the Trump administration, who've made it very clear that they intend to protect big tech as a national American industry, that also restricts the power of Europe to regulate this technology.

It's going to be really important to see over the coming months and years whether Europe is able to hold its ground and whether it really embraces the mission of becoming a home where technology and democracy work hand in hand, or whether non-democratic forces win out and big tech is allowed to run riot in the way that it has done over the last decade or so.

Alessandro Oppo: Yes. We were saying before the interview that in the future, probably the political system will change in some way, but still we don't know in which way. It could be a very good one or a very bad one. And I wonder what are your thoughts about how to go for a good system and what to avoid.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: I wish I had an easy answer to that question, because I think a lot of people are trying to figure that out right now. It's a scary time for democracy.

I've always been a big fan of deliberative theories of democracy—of the idea that the quality of democracy really depends on the quality of the communication or the discourse that informs decision-making. Sometimes "deliberative democracy" is used in a more narrow sense to describe things like mini publics and citizens' assemblies, but in the broader sense, I think it has to do with the quality of public discourse. And that's something that we've seen decline rapidly in the internet era.

Social media has restructured the way that communication works, partly by taking things out of the hands of traditional media and putting them into an unregulated arena, but partly with mechanisms that encourage conflict.

Alessandro Oppo: There were some attempts—I'm thinking also about the Five Star Movement. They tried with a platform in Italy, but then maybe it didn't work. But also there were some individuals that tried to run. As an example, I interviewed Michihito, who tried to create this AI mayor. I was thinking, what do you think about this kind of experiment? And also if you think that a very good platform could actually work? Because at the moment I see we have a certain political system that is representative democracy in Europe and the US. This is a system. We can also think about other kinds of governance systems, completely new, but then they will be a little bit disruptive. And so how to, with the system that we have now, just make some small experiments?

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: I have to say, I think I'm a fan of representative democracy. I know there's a kind of division line within the democratic innovation space between people who somehow think that the system of representative democracy, of elections, is outdated and needs to be replaced. I fall much more on the side of: we need to improve the discourse that surrounds elections and we need to improve communication between politicians and the public above all.

I'm interested in all kinds of democratic innovation. I think the ones that get me the most excited are projects that improve that flow of communication. To give maybe one example: a couple of years ago now, I looked at a project called Connecting to Parliament. This was based in Australia. It was a project that was run out of a research lab at the University of Canberra, I believe. What they did was to connect a member of parliament with a randomly selected group of their constituents.

The parliament was going to have a free vote—a vote where MPs weren't constrained to vote along with their party, because in the Westminster system if you vote against your party you can get fired. So this experiment wouldn't work with one of those votes, but they were having a vote on mitochondrial donation, which is a controversial topic because it's a technique that allows doctors to identify potential genetic defects in children prior to birth. Some parents have a predisposition to this, and it's a treatment that would prevent this genetic defect in newly born children. But it's controversial because it involves donation from a third party.

The broad point is, it's a question of bioethics. Members of the public were invited to discuss the issue with a member of parliament. In the end, he said from the start that he wouldn't just vote how these people told him to vote—it would be a discussion. But what I found very interesting about this project was that it was demonstrated to have improved trust between the members of the public and this politician.

It was actually based on a project in the United States called Connecting to Congress, based on the same idea. The results there were that people, when interviewed after the format, said that they had more trust in their representative, including across party lines. So if they were talking to a Republican congressman, they said that they trusted their congressman more than they did going in, regardless of their affiliation. They also said they were more likely to vote for that congressman, regardless of party affiliation.

For me, it's in improving this relationship that I see the most hope, because at the moment, I think populists are exploiting a lack of faith in the public and in our representatives. The relationship has been problematic for a long time. A lot of the communication resembles marketing. It's a campaigning thing. That's the form that we're used to communicating with representatives. Making a space for an honest dialogue between representatives and members of the public is really promising.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm thinking that we are used to this kind of marketing style, and at the same time I wonder if a party that tries to be honest can actually succeed, or in some way it's a sort of system that everyone has to follow if they want to be elected.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: I think very much at the national level, that's true. When you're running a national campaign, I think honesty can be harmful, unfortunately. And there's a reason why parties use these strategies.

I guess I'm thinking about things on a much more modest scale. A lot of the projects that I look at concern local council representatives. It might not even be your representative in the national parliament. It could just be someone from the local government. But I think it's an important step towards humanizing the people involved, putting a face on the politicians who hold power in your area, making you realize that these are human beings facing very difficult decisions.

Getting the public involved in these local-level decision-makings can help them to understand the kind of trade-offs that politicians are forced to make, the difficulties that they face in their work. My feeling, my hope, is that this can have a bit of a trickle-up effect. If I personally know the representative of the conservative or the socialist party in my local council, perhaps that improves my attitude towards the party at the national level.

I go back to Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman from an aristocratic family after the French Revolution. He traveled to the United States in the 1830s to see why democracy was working better in the United States than in France. He concluded it worked best of all in New England, in the states in the Northeast, around New York and Connecticut and Maine, because the local representatives were people from the community. They had other jobs in the community. There was not an aristocratic structure that pre-existed, so they weren't people with noble connections that gave them a particular standing in the community. It was relatively level starting out. People knew their local representatives.

Part of this is down to the particular way that federal government worked in the United States at the time. I think local authorities had a lot more power and the federal government would only get involved on bigger issues. But the most encouraging things I've seen in the last few years have all started at this very modest local government level or with local grassroots movements. I think this is a great way of giving people an entry point into a democratic mindset.

Alessandro Oppo: Because you mentioned Tocqueville, I'm thinking also about the dictatorship of the majority. In some way, maybe with these new systems, platforms and so on, we can also maybe not have it anymore—to have a sort of consensus-based approach or divisions, to find a new solution.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: I think when you asked me to define democracy, I kind of left some important things out, because obviously we live in liberal democracies and that has pluses and minuses. But obviously one of the things, one of the big advantages of liberal democracy is that it does not allow the majority to dictate how the minority should live and that it includes provisions to protect minorities.

I think populists, when they talk about democracy and about empowering their voters, they want a model of democracy that doesn't respect the rights of minorities. They really want something like majority rule. I thought it was important to say that.

I think you're right that these platforms provide a space that's an alternative to people's private bubbles on social media, where instead of doubling down on our own positions, we can start to move towards a consensus.

Alessandro Oppo: This is my thought: that the rule of majority sometimes can be also quite violent. And a lot of times we are used to thinking that if the majority agrees, then it's a democratic decision, also between friends or colleagues.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Absolutely. Coming back to the deliberative definition of democracy, the idea there is the strongest argument wins rather than the loudest one. It's not a democracy just because you're giving everybody a choice and then you're taking the outcome of that choice.

What needs to happen before that is a reasoned discussion where the rights of different groups within a society are given equal weight. It's not supposed to be a shouting match where the biggest group wins. Taking part in a democracy means relinquishing your own position and taking account of the needs of other people as well.

I think, again, that's something that populists deliberately overlook. They encourage an attitude of "you should be demanding more, these people are taking something away from you and you should be angry about this." That's the populist definition of democracy, where they even bother pretending to be democratic any longer—because I think even that's questionable at the moment.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm thinking, in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, what do you think we will see in the future about democratic innovations or how it could work?

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Focusing a lot on the digital stuff as I do, I am curious to see whether these efforts can be successfully scaled, because one of the issues that we've had with these kinds of formats before is orchestrating a conversation between thousands or hundreds of thousands and millions of people is not something that's been possible in the past.

With the kind of digital platforms that were launched in the last 10 years or so, it's become easier to orchestrate these large-level conversations with thousands of contributors. There are various platforms at various stages of development using AI analysis with the hope of orchestrating conversations where an unlimited number of people could be taking part.

On the one hand, I'm thinking of the deliberative platform developed by the University of Stanford, which is used for a particular kind of mini public called a deliberative polling. But technologically, it already gives you the possibility of staging the conversation with millions of participants. Now, the problem that they've encountered and that I think a lot of these formats will encounter is it's difficult to get the people to take part. You have to put something on the table for them.

In some cases with the Stanford lab, that's been payments. They did their first digital deliberation back in about 2005, at which stage they were sending participants free computers so that they could connect to the internet because they didn't all have computers.

I'm curious to see more of the results of these AI tools and how successfully they can synthesize inputs and how successful they are at making sure that the nuances of the debate aren't left behind.

Another platform that you might know, I think I mentioned it already, is Polis, which was used in the vTaiwan project. Earlier this year, they launched Polis 2.0, which I haven't had the chance to see in action yet, but which I'm very curious about because to me, it looks like the most sophisticated AI-driven consensus-forming platform.

In contrast to existing platforms, which tend to be iterative—in the kind of digital participation programs running around Europe at the moment, a government or a local government will come up with a question which they put to a public and they can deal with a few thousand responses potentially. There's a window of maybe a week where you can contribute your ideas, and then someone at the local government or from an outside agency works to digest those results and come up with a report.

The way that Polis 2.0 is set up is much more open. First, the fact that it's AI-driven means that you can ask open questions. Traditionally the way of dealing with lots and lots of inputs is to pose yes/no questions. If you have a questionnaire with yes/no questions, you could already in the sixties feed that into a computer and it would tell you this many people voted yes, this many people voted no.

With these newer systems, you can ask very open questions. Another platform doing this is GovTech, who ran a project with the NHS in the UK. They were able to start with questions like, "Tell me about your experiences as a patient of the NHS." They then used LLMs to identify common topics and to synthesize the results of these conversations.

The goal, as I've understood it, for Polis 2.0 is that you could potentially have ongoing conversations within communities that are open-ended. It uses visual mapping to show which topics are showing up, what matters to people most. It almost has the potential, at least, to create something like an alternative social media mapping exercise, where instead of seeing what people are talking about on a platform like X, where the algorithm is designed to bring out the worst in people, you could be collecting a massive amount of inputs but structured around an algorithm that's been specifically designed to draw out consensus. That's something that I find very exciting.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm also very excited. I'm thinking about what you said about the abilities of AI to really understand what the people are talking about. I think that at the moment, probably they are quite good. I'm also doing some experiments on a small platform, but I also think that in a couple of years we will have some very good AI that will be able to do it in a proper way. So I'm also excited about the scaling factor, because one thing is having an experiment with 100 people and another is really trying to deliberate on...

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Absolutely. I think I'm maybe more skeptical than you. I think there's a possibility that with LLMs we're reaching a bit of a ceiling at the moment. I've had mixed results in my own work using AI. Sometimes it's very good. Sometimes it misses the mark.

Talking to the people administrating these kinds of participation projects, they seem confident that it's giving a fairly accurate summary. What they couldn't speak to as much was whether it was leaving important things out, because if you're synthesizing this many different inputs, really covering all the bases becomes difficult.

I think the other important thing, and I mentioned it in relation to the Stanford project, is securing buy-in for these kinds of platforms. First of all, can you get people to sign up and to give their opinions? The answer has been yes when the number of participants was limited to 100 or 1,000, although it usually costs a lot of effort and a lot of money to get those 100 people or those 1,000 people. Doing that on a much larger scale is very ambitious.

To do so, I think you need the other side of the coin, which is buy-in from governments—someone in power pledging to take these inputs seriously. I think that is easier to do when they have control over the question being asked. So if they're using a platform and they've said, "We've decided that we're rebuilding this park and we'd like your input on whether you would like a playground or a pond"—if you're talking about a system like Polis 2.0, where potentially citizens can bring up whatever they like because the technology facilitates that, getting politicians to commit in some way to taking the results of that seriously becomes much more problematic.

But perhaps the answer then is that these technologies return to their grassroots origins, because Decidim and Consul came out of grassroots movements. Maybe the people consulting these platforms aren't first and foremost politicians. Maybe it's journalists who are looking to get an idea of what people are talking about. Or maybe it is political parties who want to connect with their voter base. Or maybe it is civil society, because in a healthy democracy civil society exercises influence over decision-making processes. And if they can demonstrate that millions of members of the public agree with them, that can play into their hands as well.

Alessandro Oppo: At the end there are a lot of power dynamics behind. I also saw that participation—the fact that building a platform now is easy, but to get people involved is quite hard. And also I was thinking about the commitment from politicians. That is also another problem, I would say, because some people could run for an election now saying that they will use the platform and they can also say that they will just do what the platform says, what the citizens are talking about.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: It's been done. It's definitely been done already. I'm not sure if they use digital platforms, but in Germany and the UK, I think there were people promising to use democratic innovations to collect inputs from citizens and to vote accordingly in parliament.

Alessandro Oppo: But what I think is that because there is not really a commitment, they just say it and then they can also do the platform in a way where polls are just about which color to choose to paint the building.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Yeah. The worst I think we saw was a project in Germany somewhere and it was you could choose the name of a ship on the playground. They were going to put the name of the ship on the side of it. Why would people take part in something like that?

But I think you're right that there's the risk that politicians see this as either a PR tool or another kind of polling tool. I think if you look at what happened in France—Macron has experimented with varying formats of democratic innovation. When he launched En Marche, the political party, he first promised a kind of bottom-up ideas-gathering party structure where anyone could launch a local branch. That was a very clever move on his part because it meant he could very quickly grow a party base. But eventually the promises weren't delivered on. The membership was supposed to be allowed to select a portion of his cabinet, and that promise very quickly fell away.

He also launched the public notebook project during the Yellow Vest protests, where you had something like a million people show up either online or to their local town halls to write their inputs into these notebooks that were left out to say what they think needed to change. His initial promise was, "We're going to use this to develop a new sort of manifesto." And it didn't happen. In fact, he promised to share scans online of all of the notebooks and that hasn't happened yet either.

He's done other things. He has integrated citizens' assemblies into the structure of French government more seriously than has happened elsewhere. But I think he illustrates the risk. First of all, the appeal that this stuff can have to politicians, and then the risk that as soon as it's propelled them into office or as soon as it's fulfilled their purpose for them, they lose interest.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm still thinking about this commitment thing. We said there are some power dynamics, so we can understand the point of view of a politician that reads the report of a platform and that report is going against him or what he wants to do. We can understand the point of view, why he's not interested in applying what has been discussed or decided by the people. I can understand also what you were saying before, that maybe a platform can be helpful for organizations or maybe political parties that then they can show, "Hey, there are a lot of people that are supporting us and they want this," maybe they have a list of changes. So I am thinking, does that commitment have to go with power dynamics? Do they have to...

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: This is a big question and I think this is where my opinion differs slightly from some other people in this sector, because for a lot of them, the key to a successful format is that it has some kind of direct impact at the level of legislation. The best example of a citizens' assembly is one where the Irish examples are always cited, where you had deliberations on topics including blasphemy, but also same-sex marriage and abortion. These were then put to a referendum and they led to changes in Irish law.

So gay marriage was legalized in part thanks to a democratic innovation, and abortion was legalized in part thanks to this. I was chatting with someone from Ireland the other day who pointed out that, for the parties involved, this was a way of getting some very difficult issues out of their hands. This was "I don't want to have to deal with the issue of abortion, we'll just hand this over to these people and let them make the decision."

There are other cases where these formats have had a direct impact on legislation, but more often than not, they lead to a set of recommendations and then it fails to gain traction at the parliamentary level.

I personally don't know if all of our efforts should really be focused on closing that gap. I think where I see potential is for these formats to shift public discussion. This comes back to the deliberative democracy thing that I was talking about.

I'll give you an example I've been thinking about a lot. Recently, I live in Berlin, where housing prices have exploded over the last 10 to 15 years. In the last couple of weeks, I started seeing articles in the mainstream media saying, "You know what, we've let property speculators run riot in our cities and this is a problem for Europe."

My response to that is to say, "We know, and I know that, and my neighbors know that." This is something that people I know have been discussing in private for a very long time, but it's not reflected at the level of public discourse. The conversations that are happening in newspapers and in parliaments and in political campaigns often fail to reflect the concerns of people at ground level.

These tools, especially large-scale digital solutions, have the potential to allow us to listen in on the actual concerns that people have, the actual conversations that they're having. I'm not sure that it's important that those conversations then lead directly to legislation. It doesn't have to be, "Okay, Parliament has agreed that whatever these people are talking about will be implemented." It's far too complicated to make a promise like that. You have commitments to your party.

But my hope a little bit is that you would see a broader shift where the public have some sway on shifting the direction of public discourse. Then maybe where we hear very loudly discussions about migration, which I think is something a lot of people are concerned about, maybe we would also start to hear about some of the other concerns that don't get amplified by the right-wing press. This is really where I come from when I think about these platforms.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm thinking about what you were saying, that people have private political discussions. They discuss about politics, about what they don't like in their city or town. I thought a lot that we should in some way find a way to give value to the richness of these conversations, because sometimes they are very deep. Sometimes maybe it could be that I have a conversation with you—it could be also this, like a private call—but at the same time, the transcription, the AI analyzing and so on. So instead of asking people to participate in an assembly on a specific platform and so on, maybe we should just build a platform that integrates with their lives so they can live and at the same time also participate in the political life.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: No, I think that's right. I think the good thing about this is it doesn't require political uptake necessarily. It doesn't require a prime minister or a president to say, "Okay, we pledge to do whatever the people conclude in this."

There are newspapers throughout Europe who are very interested in this stuff and alternative modes of gauging public opinion, and there have been experiments with different magazine formats and stuff. The Süddeutsche and the Spiegel in Germany have both been engaged in different modes of collecting public opinion.

I think the press in a well-functioning democracy plays that mediating role between the political class and the public. I think they can play an important role in feeding back to the public the political difficulties of realizing every wish that we might have. But they also should be reflecting those conversations that are being held in private and the things that matter to people most.

I think most journalists at reputable outlets want to do that. We do have a problem with populist press that is just spitting out clickbait and serving as an amplifier for public anger. But I think the press at its best should really be reflecting the everyday concerns that people have.

If the press succeeds at doing that better, I think we can expect a higher quality of political debate. I think we can expect political parties to listen and to start forming their manifestos around—political manifestos are driven by public discourse. We had parties here in Germany, the liberal party suddenly turned into an anti-immigration party before the last elections. This went against years of practice on that part, but they saw that it was the dominant topic in the media and they reacted.

I think if we can find a way of tapping the other—again, I'm not saying we shouldn't be talking about migration as an issue. It's clearly a concern for a lot of people, but I think there's a lot of frustration on other issues, on housing, on public health. Parents who are struggling with full-time work and inadequate childcare—if we had a better way of monitoring all of those concerns, then that would feed into a healthier representative democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: Absolutely. I had some thoughts because at the moment there are platforms—I mean, we can build a platform or brainstorm about the platform for private conversations. I mean, private people that want to publish, to share their conversations and thoughts. But then I think about AI and I think that these are things that we should actually do as people in this space. And then I wonder, if this AI that is evolving so quickly—if in some years it would be just that, you know, like if now ChatGPT can listen to every conversation and so on, then you don't need anymore a platform because that is the platform.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: But how would the initial inputs get gathered then? Through ChatGPT or?

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah, good question. I don't know.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: My concern there—and I said before that I'm a little skeptical about the capacity of AI—is that the claims are getting less bold from the industry side. Now there's been fewer claims of massive breakthroughs. I take that as a sign that things are slowing down, because they're doing marketing when they make these announcements. They will hype where they can.

I think there's also the concern that ChatGPT and all of these chatbots will become more and more monetized and market-driven, which is a pattern that we've seen with all of tech. Google used to be a much better search engine before the whole thing was sold out to advertising. You now buy a higher ranking and it can be very difficult to find something on Google today precisely because its primary purpose is not to provide you with answers but to generate profit through sponsored content.

To my knowledge, that's not such an issue with ChatGPT. They're trying out membership models, paid memberships. The same thing happened with social media. Social media was a much freer conversation that's gradually been funneled into this marketing logic. I would expect, I would be skeptical that ChatGPT would be the tool to do this because I think it will be more and more enthralled to commercial interests over the coming years. But I share some of your optimism that AI could be one of the tools that we use to connect to larger numbers of people.

Alessandro Oppo: I think also that maybe if we build a tool specific for governance, participation and so on, then it would be also maybe more explainable. It will not be a black box. That is the big danger of having AI in governance.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Absolutely. I think that's one of the big topics that needs to be addressed—at least finding a way of monitoring the accuracy of these AI outputs, which is difficult when you're trying to scale big, but also this problem that AI poses wherever it's used by governments. I'm looking at the kind of algorithms that they're using to catch tax frauds or things like this. There's always an accountability problem when the people in government, the people making decisions, don't understand what's going on in this black box. That creates a democratic deficit.

Alessandro Oppo: A sort of technocracy, I would say also.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Yeah. And I think people are also skeptical. I think you need to be upfront with people. I think people react differently if you say, "If you write this message on this platform, someone in your local government will read it." If you tell them, "If you write this message, AI will digest this and spit out a result," people are probably more skeptical. And if they're not already, then they will be over coming years.

I think there's still, in many quarters, a lot of enthusiasm for AI and people have a lot of faith in it. But the more—it's like automated answering services where you're talking to a robot. I think people will get more disenchanted and start to think, "Can I talk to a person? Is my voice really significant if it's just being digested by an algorithm that nobody really understands?" So there's questions to be answered.

Alessandro Oppo: I agree. Also, this is something I've seen in many platforms—I mean, civic tech platforms that have a chatbot. I think it's useful, chatbot can be a powerful instrument, but at the same time it would be nice to think about solutions that people can use in the real world, in face-to-face. We should not talk to a chatbot, but we should talk to another person and maybe having a chatbot that will listen to us.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: I think the best digital formats that I've seen over the last decade have been ones that include an offline component. If we go back to vTaiwan and we go back to Decidim and Consul, these platforms were used as an extension of a grassroots political movement that was really based on going out into the community.

I was talking to the vTaiwan team recently and they were saying one of the most important things is having meetings with good food. It's about making people want to come together and talk to each other. I think even irrespective of outputs and what happens to the outputs of these processes, that's a definite plus. If you can cultivate an attitude and a behavior in people where they are used to talking to people from within their community who they didn't know before, who maybe have different views to them, and they get used to a conversation structured around seeking consensus, then that's a big win for democracy even if there's no immediate product from that.

The key is to do that in a way that people don't get frustrated and say, "This isn't producing any results, so why am I bothering?" But I think in a way, it can also be its own reward. I may be too optimistic and have too much faith in the good nature of most people. But I do think that when you talk to people about their experiences in mini publics, most people say it was a wonderful experience, that they benefited immensely from talking to people they wouldn't have otherwise met.

If you can create an atmosphere where people have more and more of these opportunities, and there are cities around Europe where this is the case—Cascais in Portugal is a great example. My organization has a partner organization called European Capital of Democracy, and beginning in November, I think, Cascais will hold the title of European Capital of Democracy.

What Cascais has done over the last 10 or 12 years, at least, is to implement more and more of these participative formats, to integrate them into other government services where people are no longer doing this for the first time. If they go for a walk down their street, they will see some kind of project that was built thanks to public inputs gathered through a participatory budget. They will have friends or teachers who are community monitors who are helping the local government monitor problems in their area.

I think if you can cultivate that kind of community at the local level, then that's maybe almost more important to me than this opinion-collecting exercise. Yes, it's important for people to have an input, but it's more important to get people to make an ethical commitment to democracy. That's something that unfortunately is eroding at the moment, and more and more young people don't feel that connection. So I would say that's almost more important than ever more sophisticated opinion-gathering mechanisms.

Alessandro Oppo: Just a couple of questions because would you like to share something about you? I don't know where—you said you live in Berlin, but have you lived...

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Sure. Good question. So I'm from the UK originally, from England. But my family moved around quite a lot. When I was smaller, I spent a bit of time in the States and in Australia. I've been living in the German-speaking world for about 10 years now. I moved to Berlin while I was finishing up my PhD in philosophy.

I'm a dad actually. I have a three-year-old son, so I'm learning to reassess political priorities in the wake of being a family and suddenly aware of how small the voice of families is becoming in the political space. It was announced a few weeks ago that among voters, parents are now actually in a minority. They don't hold much sway.

Sorry, I've gone back on topic and away from the personal. Otherwise, I guess my other big passions outside of democracy are probably music. I actually studied electronic composition. From an early age on, I guess I was 17 when I started my degree, and I was studying how digital tools could change how music was composed. So I guess there's always been this interest in how technology is changing things. I don't compose music these days, but yeah, music still plays a big part in my life.

Alessandro Oppo: This is interesting. I think people discuss, then there is an analysis, then music is composed based on what the people talk about. Or maybe it could be vice versa. Like a sort of disco where people can also talk and participate.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: That would be an interesting project. Music is a great way of social bonding.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah. We were saying that the problem is participation, getting people to show up. If there is music, usually people show up.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Absolutely. I like that.

Alessandro Oppo: If you have a message for the people in this space, other researchers, people that are...

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Good question. Again, I think I said this at the start, but just to reiterate, we had quite a theoretical discussion again, and that's sort of my space. But my ultimate respect goes out to the people who are implementing these projects. It's fun having conversations about where this stuff is going and what problems we think it solves, but I just have tremendous respect for the people going out into the communities and making this stuff happen. It's been my privilege to spend the last few years studying what they're doing and talking to them. So to them, I guess, thank you and keep doing it.

The other message, and I think maybe I alluded to this already, is that representative democracy is a good thing. It's probably the best thing human beings have ever achieved. At the ballot box, each of us has an equal share in power. A hundred, 200 years ago, this was a very abstract idea. It hasn't been a reality for very long. It was never perfected.

I don't think we should be promoting democratic innovations as an alternative to it. At the moment, it's a dangerous time to be thinking about changing anything. If you start talking about elections as a failed model, I think that's counterproductive. So maybe my message would be: please stop doing that, because I've seen it in some cases to promote these methods. I've seen it in fairly high-level interviews and in major publications—people saying elections are broken, here's why a mini public is a better idea than that.

My feeling when I see something like that is always to ask how maybe a Black American community might feel—a community that fought for a long time to have the right to vote and to run for office and to have their vote counted. To tell those people, "We're going to take the vote away, but don't worry. When the decision is made, there will be at least 10 Black people in the room." That's a disaster, if you ask me.

So let's not help the populists trying to undermine representative democracy. Let's find ways of strengthening it.

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you a lot, Graham.

Graham Wetherall-Grujić: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Alessandro Oppo: It was my pleasure.

End of interview