At a glance
- What it is: Citizen participation and technology: lessons from the fields of deliberative democracy and science and technology studies, a theoretical essay.
- Who: Iñaki Goñi, a researcher in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He was previously an academic at the Universidad Católica de Chile and has worked on large-scale participatory processes, including the Chilean constitutional process.
- Where: Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (part of the Nature group), 2025. doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04606-4
- Type: conceptual article, single author. There are no data or experiments: it is a review and an argument.
First reading: what it does and what it finds
It helps to start with what kind of text this is, because that organizes everything else. It is not an empirical study. Goñi does not measure anything or test any tool. He puts into conversation two academic fields that study almost the same thing and almost never talk to each other: deliberative democracy, which thinks about how to get people to truly deliberate on public matters, and science and technology studies, STS, which study how science and technology are made and governed. His contribution is a simple and elegant observation about how each field uses the other.
The central idea is a crossover of question and answer. In deliberative democracy, citizen participation is the problem, and technology arrives as the solution: digital tools, natural language processing and AI promise to organize large volumes of opinions, to moderate and, in words Goñi himself picks up, “to bring deliberation to the masses.” In STS, the equation is reversed: technology is the problem, and citizen participation is the answer, because bringing citizens in is what makes technical decisions legitimate. The same pair, participation and technology, works as a problem in one field and as a remedy in the other.
Goñi organizes this with a table of frames. For deliberative democracy, the problem is that participation does not deliver: it is hard to produce collective intelligence and to connect mini-publics with mass politics, and the way out is to rely on technical solutions. For STS, the problem is that technical solutions lack legitimacy, because the boundaries of expertise are flexible and the technical needs to be politicized, and the way out is to rely on participation. What is interesting about the argument is that it detects a common ground: both fields share the same principle of inclusion, broadening who counts, even if they apply it to different things.
The uncomfortable finding comes next. Goñi argues that, without careful dialogue, both fields end up in their own version of solutionism. Deliberativists fall into technological solutionism, expecting a good tool to fix deliberation. STS scholars fall into participatory solutionism, believing that adding more participation fixes legitimacy, without a deeper theory of democracy. In both cases a complicated problem is reduced to a sellable recipe.
From there come the cross-lessons, which are the constructive part. STS reminds deliberative democracy of three things: that materiality matters, because deliberations take place through artifacts, rooms and platforms, not in a vacuum; that design does not end when the tool is delivered, because people transform it as they use it; and that expertise is never neutral, so expert knowledge cannot be treated as clean information that citizens simply receive. To STS, deliberative democracy offers what it lacks: normative theory, ideas of justice, equity and legitimacy that STS tends to sidestep, and a fine-grained knowledge of how political systems work from the inside, from the micropolitics of the officials who design participation to the realpolitik of the interests at stake.
Second reading: from Latin America
Goñi himself closes by leaving the door open toward us, and he makes it explicit. After laying out the whole argument, he adds a geopolitical dimension: at a global scale, one can ask whose democracy is being fixed by whose technology, and whose technology is being bought by whose governments. Who sets the rules, which company sells the tool, who never gets to make their question heard. These are his words, not mine, although he himself clarifies that developing this falls outside the scope of the article. He leaves it as an agenda, not a finding.
And it is worth underlining where he writes from, because it is not a detail. Goñi worked as an academic in Chile and took part in large-scale deliberative processes, including the Chilean constitutional process, before settling in Edinburgh. His warning about solutionism is not abstract for the region: Latin America has been fertile ground for both of the temptations the text describes. On one hand, the faith that a participation platform or an AI model will unlock public conversation. On the other, the faith that opening a process to citizens is enough to make it legitimate. Both promise a lot and, without the finesse the text calls for, disappoint.
Here is a reading of my own, not the paper’s. The distinction between the two solutionisms works as a checklist for any government or municipality in the region that wants to buy a civic tech tool or set up a participatory process with AI. The STS question, whose expertise seeps into the tool and what it leaves out, becomes concrete when the model that classifies citizen comments was trained in another language and another context. And the deliberative democracy question, how this connects with the real political system, keeps the exercise from ending up as a nice gesture with no consequences. The paper did not study any Latin American case, so this is my extrapolation; what the text does provide is the framework to avoid being sold a bill of goods.
The question it leaves is his own, brought to the region: when a Latin American government brings technology and participation together, which one is it treating as the problem and which as the magic solution? If the answer is that one of the two simply comes to rescue the other, the text suggests that is where solutionism shows up, and that the way out is not to pick a side, but to get the two into dialogue.
The fine print
- It is a conceptual essay, not an empirical study. Its value lies in organizing a debate and proposing bridges, not in measuring anything or demonstrating that this or that tool works. Anyone looking for data or cases will not find them here, and that is not a flaw: it is what the text sets out to do.
- The discussion moves almost entirely within the literature of the Global North, Europe and the United States. The geopolitical and Latin American dimension appears only at the end and as a limitation acknowledged by the author himself, not as a developed argument. Treating it as a contribution of the paper would go further than the text allows.
Paper keywords: deliberative democracy, science and technology studies, public participation, civic technology, expertise
Automated reading. This text was generated by Claude, an Anthropic model, from the original source, without line-by-line human review. It may contain errors or debatable interpretations; to check any point, see the original source.