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Citizen Participation and Machine Learning for a Better Democracy

Published: 11 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The development of democratic systems is a crucial task as confirmed by its selection as one of the Millennium Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. In this article, we report on the progress of a project that aims to address barriers, one of which is information overload, to achieving effective direct citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. The main objectives are to explore if the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning can improve citizens’ experience of digital citizen participation platforms. Taking as a case study the “Decide Madrid” Consul platform, which enables citizens to post proposals for policies they would like to see adopted by the city council, we used NLP and machine learning to provide new ways to (a) suggest to citizens proposals they might wish to support; (b) group citizens by interests so that they can more easily interact with each other; (c) summarise comments posted in response to proposals; and (d) assist citizens in aggregating and developing proposals. Evaluation of the results confirms that NLP and machine learning have a role to play in addressing some of the barriers users of platforms such as Consul currently experience.
CCS concepts: • Human-centred computing→Collaborative and social computing • Computing methodologies→Artificial intelligence→Natural language processing

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cover image Digital Government: Research and Practice
Digital Government: Research and Practice  Volume 2, Issue 3
Regular Papers
July 2021
102 pages
EISSN:2639-0175
DOI:10.1145/3474845
Issue’s Table of Contents
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 July 2021
Online AM: 04 May 2021
Accepted: 01 February 2021
Revised: 01 January 2021
Received: 01 June 2020
Published in DGOV Volume 2, Issue 3

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  1. Natural language processing
  2. digital citizen participation platforms
  3. machine learning

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