Next date: | Universität Erfurt; Erfurt | Workshop

Democracy in the Age of Digitalization

This interdisciplinary workshop will reflect on the transformation that democracy is undergoing in the age of digitalization. Platform economies, social media, and artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing both the collective processes of decision-making and opinion-forming and the very forms of democratic life.

Consequently, democratic theory today is no longer conceivable without theories of digitalization. This intertwining of democracy and digitalization will be explored at the workshop from the perspectives of law, sociology, philosophy, and political science, as well as through the lens of social theory with regard to the question of ownership. The workshop will focus on three guiding questions at different levels. On a descriptive level, it will examine how democratic digitalization is and how digital democracy is. On the normative level, the workshop will address the question of how democratic digitalization should be and how digital democracy should be. Finally, the relationship between democracy and digitalization will be systematically examined in light of the following question: Does the digitalization of democracy require a democratization of the digital realm? And if so, how can digital infrastructures—and in particular those of artificial intelligence—be democratized?