Technology and Democracy in Symbiosis? A Normative Movement Explored Through Democratic Theory, Design Thinking and Action Research

Since the 2014 Sunflower Movement, examples of civic technology initiatives from Taiwan have been central to discourses about how technology can be used to support democratic values, influencing a wide range of initiatives around the world. A central piece of the Taiwanese digital democracy model is the use of the online platform Polis via the vTaiwan initiative, celebrated for enabling large-scale agenda-setting and consensus-building on contentious issues by combining deliberation and voting through its wiki-survey structure and real-time algorithmic analysis. The Taiwanese model has inspired an international movement animated by a vision for a 'symbiotic relationship between democracy and collaborative technology’. This discourse is crystalised in the git-based collaborative book 'Plurality', co-authored by Audrey Tang, a civic hacker who became first digital minister of Taiwan. Despite strong influence in many applied democratic innovation networks, scholarly engagement with these ideas and their implications for political theory has so far been limited. This paper offers a multi-layered consideration of these technological and conceptual developments, and their implications for democratic theory, through abductive normative and empirical work. It is based on action-research case studies in which Polis was in used in Australia as part of collective decision-making on climate-related issues. Claims about Polis as a platform and methods for its use were taken as a starting point for democratic design in the two case studies as well as for empirical analysis and evaluation, integrating these with theories from political theory and design thinking scholarship. The analysis provides critical insights into key debates and normative tensions in democratic innovation scholarship, including: • trade-offs between inclusivity, scale and breadth of participation versus richness, depth and deliberation • debates about the value of consensus and disagreement • relationships between affordances of platforms and norms for their use, particularly pertaining to polarisation On each of these matters, claims have been made about the potential for Polis to advance new democratic possibilities. This research draws upon mixed methods empirical data from within and around the Polis conversations, including ethnographic action-research insights, and normative theoretical work, to explore implications for the future of value-based democratic process design, particularly those involving digital tools.