AGENCY, AUTHORITY & ACCOUNTABILITY IN AUGMENTED DEMOCRACY
Augmented democracy is a concept that proposes using technology to make political systems more inclusive and responsive. A key proposed benefit is its potential to grant a political voice to those who might otherwise be excluded from participation by acting on their behalf. In theory, this wider and more constant inclusion of perspectives could lead to better-informed and more representative collective decisions. The rise of computational agents that can summarize, represent, and act on citizens’ political preferences tagged “digital twins” presses democratic political theory in new ways. This paper examines the idea of using digital twins; computer copies built from a person’s data to act on their behalf in democratic processes. It focuses on three main questions: whether digital twins can truly reflect a person’s will agency, whether they should have the power to make decisions authority, and who is responsible when something goes wrong accountability. Thus, the central problem addressed in this paper is the legitimacy of representation in augmented democracy; whether computational agents, designed as digital twins, can genuinely speak and act on behalf of citizens without undermining the foundational principles of autonomy, accountability, and agency. The paper employs the analytic method of philosophy to investigate competing accounts of representation and deliberation, tests their implications in the context of digital twins. The paper concludes that while digital twins could help improve democracy in some ways, they must be carefully designed to protect human agency and ensure fairness. Without the right safeguards, they risk undermining the very values they claim to support.
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