The Digital Reorganization of Deliberation and Democratic Public Life

A growing class of technologies, from open-source platforms to large language model systems that summarise, cluster, or synthesise public input, promises to assist, mediate, and scale democratic deliberation. Deployed in citizens' assemblies, constitutional processes, and corporate governance alike, these tools are increasingly positioned as infrastructure for collective will-formation and inclusive participation. Yet their sociological and political implications remain underexamined.

This session invites contributions that interrogate AI-assisted deliberation as a sociotechnical and political phenomenon rather than a neutral instrument. We are interested in how such systems render publics legible, what models of consensus, participation, and rationality they presuppose, and how they redistribute authority between citizens, designers, and machines. Central to such investigations are questions around how do these technologies reconfigure conflict, representation, and legitimacy, whose voices become computable, and whose are filtered out?

We welcome empirical, theoretical, and methodological papers drawing on STS, democratic theory, critical algorithm studies, and the sociologies of technologies and participation. Contributions attentive to design practices, institutional uptake, or the normative assumptions embedded in deliberative AI are particularly encouraged. The session's aim is to move both beyond unquestioned hype and immediate dismissal toward a sustained sociological account of what these systems do to democratic life.