In February 2025, the state of California announced a new deliberative democracy program and platform. Carnegie California played a collaborative role in its development and launch, bringing in scholarly and practitioner expertise from California and around the world. The essay below captures key ideas from scholars and practitioner experts that informed that process.
Governments around the world, especially those at the subnational and local levels, find themselves stuck in a vise. Planetary problems like climate change, disease, and technological disruption are not being addressed adequately by national governments. Everyday people, whose lives have been disrupted by those planetary problems, press the governments closer to them to step up and protect them. But those governments lack the technical capacity and popular trust to act effectively against bigger problems.
To build trust and capacity, many governments are moving governance into the digital world and asking their residents to do more of the work of government themselves. Some cities, provinces, and political institutions have tried to build digital platforms and robust digital environments where residents can improve service delivery and make government policy themselves.
However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for governments seeking to work more closely with their people.
What does fun look like in this sphere? I first witnessed a truly fun and engaging digital tool for citizen governance in Rome in 2018. While running a democracy conference with Mayor Virginia Raggi and her team, they were always on their phones, and not just to answer emails or texts. They were constantly on a digital environment called Rousseau.
Rousseau was named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher and author of The Social Contract. In that 1762 book, Rousseau argued that city-states (like his hometown of Geneva) were more naturally suited to democracy than nation-states (especially big nations like France). He also wrote that the people themselves, not elected representatives, were the best rulers through what we today call direct democracy.
Raggi, who was mayor of Rome from 2016 to 2021, was a member of a populist party called the Five Star Movement. This party was organized around direct democracy and two other things. One was comedy; the other, the Internet. The Five Star Movement was started in 2013 by a comedian, Beppe Grillo, after his personal travel blog was inundated by hilarious posts from his fans about corruption in the various cities he was visiting. “This is what the establishment is scared of: Of joy, of the sense of humor, of irony,” Grillo declared.
Grillo’s idea was to organize a party that would operate entirely online, with its members (those anticorruption commenters), not any party boss, making the decisions. Rousseau, the party’s online platform, was built in Milan by the visionary entrepreneur and activist Gianroberto Casaleggio and his son Davide. Rousseau was lively and even funny, which drew people in. But there are other lively websites. What made Rousseau irresistible and could keep you on your phone were three features.
The first was the platform’s high stakes. Rousseau was not just where politics could be discussed, but also where policies could be decided. The platform had three modules. In one module, any registered user in the party could propose a new law, revise it, and build support for it; every few months, the most popular proposals on Rousseau would be introduced as legislation in local or national parliament. In a second module, party members would decide what positions they would take on existing legislation, laws, regulations, and practices at all political levels—local, regional, and national. In a third module, the party would decide which candidates it would field for political offices.
The second thing Rousseau had was scoreboards. In the tool, you could see which proposals or candidates were winning or losing at any time. You could also keep score on yourself. Rousseau had a system where members could earn merit badges based on their expertise (in areas such as energy, the environment, or the economy) or via online courses they completed in Rousseau’s learning module.
Even so, the scoreboards did not reveal everything about Rousseau. That mystery was the third thing that made the platform engaging. Although Rousseau would show its users the proposals put forward by other people and give running tallies on their popularity, the platform was not transparent or open source. When pressed about Rousseau’s inner workings, the Casaleggios could be cryptic and cagey, citing security as justification for nondisclosure.
This caution, while understandable, inspired all manner of conjecture and conspiracy theories—about Davide Casaleggio being a wizard of Oz manipulating data behind the scenes, about undetected hacking or deliberate selection of supposedly successful candidates, or about members claiming to have found “cheat codes” to help their proposals win.
None of this speculation would be proven, and none of it stopped people from using the platform. In fact, it drew people in. Five Star members wanted to participate, but they also wanted to gossip about and try to figure out how Rousseau might actually work. Sometimes it seemed that everyone in the party was talking about Rousseau almost all the time, even in Roman nightclubs.
The secret sauce of Rousseau was that it was a puzzle, which produced suspense. And this suspense felt like it could go on forever.
The Essence of a Riddle
The power of puzzles is not a novelty. Aristotle, in his Poetics, compared drama to puzzles and riddles. As he noted, “the essence of a riddle is to express true facts under impossible combinations.” Riddles are engaging because they arouse our curiosity and force us to think creatively about reconciling facts and combinations.
In Aristotle’s Athens, those theatrical riddles—in the form of plays—were so central to civic life that they were funded by the polis, or city-state. They also were presented in competition, with audiences voting on their favorites. Drama and democracy went hand-in-hand, two related methods of engagement. To be sure, Aristotle preferred an enlightened aristocracy based on merit, to democracy. But he also conceded that crowds had wisdom that no ruler could match.
Aristotle probably would not be surprised that, in the twenty-first century, new tools of engagement and entertainment, and new tools of democracy, have emerged in our great cities. Nor would he be shocked to see their fusion into digital democracy tools. Digital democratic tools—software or processes or online environments for participation or decisionmaking—are responses to three contemporary puzzles. First, everyday people are less engaged with democracy than in previous generations. Second, they have less trust in it. And third, as a result of the lack of engagement and trust, they are granting less power and agency to democratic institutions.
The best digital democracy tools put the puzzle pieces together, like a Greek play. Because of democratic traditions of ancient Greece, it is no surprise that many digital democracy tools have Greek-themed names. Aristotle would surely approve of the name of a leading survey-based tool, Pol.is, which allows large groups to share opinions and ideas. And given his appreciation for drama, the philosopher would not have been surprised that another durable tool for collective digital decisionmaking, Ethelo (from the ancient Greek word for “intention”), emerged from a global center of television, production television, and movie production—Vancouver.
Polis and Ethelo were created by nongovernmental organizations. But just as city-states once funded plays, today’s city governments create digital democracy tools—indeed, entire digital democratic architectures—to win the attention and participation of their people.
One such tool, now known as Consul Democracy, originally was designed by Madrid city councilor Pablo Soto, who had a background in software design. It allowed for all kinds of digital deliberation and communication between Madrid citizens and their government, but its most powerful use was as a way for citizens to propose a law or government action. Like Rousseau, Consul had both stakes and a scoreboard. Any proposal receiving the support of 1 percent of Madrid’s adult population would advance to a 45-day period for deliberation, concluding with a vote by the people of whether to enact it.
Consul is now used by hundreds of cities and other local institutions worldwide, yet it is only the second most successful digital democracy tool from Spain. Decidim (“Let’s Decide” in Catalan) was created and funded by Barcelona and developed under the highly progressive administration of Mayor Ada Colau during the 2010s. The platform is open source and flexible, allowing people to design their own proposals, budgets, and consultations.
Decidim has been adopted by more than 400 entities in thirty countries. It may be most popular in Brazil. There, Delibera Brasil, a democracy innovator, engaged social media influencers to make the platform a sensation among younger Brazilians. There are more than 1.4 million registered users and 8,200 proposals on the platform.
Digital Democracy in Decline
Such success stories have been harder to find since the pandemic’s arrival. The worldwide democracy decline includes a decline in the number of democratic online platforms, according the Solonian Democracy Institute’s 2024 report on such tools. “The adoption of digital technology for civic purposes has undergone a turbulent period: some vendors have been acquired by larger, more generally focused, entities, while others have shuttered operations for the foreseeable future,” Solonian’s Roslyn Fuller writes. “It cannot be denied that this field has thinned.”
Fuller blames this thinning on two factors. First, extreme partnership has led to “an intense focus” on specific political outcomes, rather than developing better democratic processes. Second, large private foundations and governments are putting money into their own agendas, rather than tools to empower everyday citizens.
One casualty of this retrenchment was Rousseau. In 2021, disputes between Five Star and Davide Casaleggio—over fees for maintaining the platform, as well as control of user data—left the party unable to use the platform. Five Star, which briefly had been the largest party in the Italian parliament, is now a minor party among the opposition.
Making Democracy Fun Again
Of course, the disappearance of some digital democracy tools leaves openings to design new ones. But competition for people’s attention is high. There is no consensus on how to design digital democracy tools to engage people now.
The ideas voiced at democracy conferences often involve incorporating games into processes. This thinking is championed by Josh Lerner, who codirects a global hub for participation called People Powered. Lerner has been practicing and studying the intersection between games and democracy for decades—with a focus on two participatory programs around housing, one in Rosario, Argentina, the other in Toronto. In his book Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics, Lerner favors designs that encourage play. Democratic processes, he suggests, should divide participants into teams that can compete in challenges. Progress in processes should be measured and included on scoreboards. Visuals should be colorful, and sound effects can be both funny and fun.
Lerner’s most intriguing examples involve processes that Aristotle would recognize. He details techniques from theater—with participants in a democratic process staging plays or scenes—to figure out a bureaucratic problem or find a path to compromise. He also delves into literal puzzles. In Rosario, for example, residents of informal settlements struggled to decide together on a plan for a new modern neighborhood where they would live—until they were given literal puzzle pieces in the sizes of different lots. Then, they happily arranged those pieces into a coherent new neighborhood.
Lerner also makes a case for using games to present technical information to people in democratic processes. In Toronto, it was hard for everyday people to understand the details of the participatory budgeting process in which they were engaged—until such information was presented in a game-show style process modeled on the television show Jeopardy!
Those three essential elements of the Rousseau platform—stakes, scoreboards, and suspense—can be amplified with games. Suspense in particular can be brought to bear on the outcome. In Argentina, participants helped design their new neighborhood with puzzles, but no one knew which puzzle piece—which lot—they would receive until the dramatic end. Similarly, Lerner writes, in Toronto’s participatory budgeting, the winning budget elements were not revealed to participants until the end, when they appeared one by one, to maximize the drama.
Having Lunch or Making Television Together
People enjoy participating in the democratic process more when they are able to spend downtime with their fellow participants and develop personal relationships, as Marjan Ehsassi of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy demonstrates in her new book, Activated Citizenship: The Transformative Power of Citizens’ Assemblies. Such connections are harder to achieve in digital processes, but not impossible. Participants can share lunch breaks in digital breakout rooms, or even play video games together. The fundamental challenge is getting people to use platforms and participate in the first place.
Lotteries, which are popular deliberative processes, are being considered as a way to draw people to democracy in the digital world. This approach might include entering every user of a digital democracy tool in a lottery to win cash or other prizes. Such efforts are hardly novel. Some communities around the world have prize lotteries to encourage people to vote. Event conveners and concert promoters have offered lottery entries to attendees in order to draw crowds. And during the pandemic, the state of California held a $116.5 million “Vax for the Win” lottery to award cash prizes to those who got their COVID-19 vaccinations.
Even the most technologically advanced democratic tools can employ old methods to draw people in. Cortico, an AI-based tool for capturing conversations, is using media partnerships, including NPR, to win attention. And in Latvia, the creators of the digital deliberation and petition tool Mana Balss (“My Voice”) struggled for attention until they started hosting a Mana Balss television show. The guests were regular Latvians who had offered proposals on the online platform. It might have been the world’s most democratic television program.
And it lasted longer than most of the world’s online governance platforms—it stayed on the air for three years.
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