Democracy Movements in Authoritarian Contexts

In the AI Story

The workshop's framing starts from an empirical claim: democracy movements worldwide have experienced significant decline in their ability to challenge autocratic governments over the past decade. The decline has multiple causes (economic, political, demographic), but the changing technology landscape is among the most significant. AI has become a force multiplier for state capacity in exactly the domains where civil society needs to operate: information distribution, coordination, identification of sympathetic populations.

The asymmetry operates across regime types but manifests differently. In authoritarian contexts, AI concentrates state power over civil society through surveillance and censorship. In democratic contexts, AI concentrates corporate power through persuasion and attention capture. The common structural feature is that AI amplifies the capacities of already-powerful actors — states and corporations — while providing relatively fewer new capacities to the populations these actors govern.

The implications for empowered participatory governance are direct. The institutional designs for participatory AI governance developed in the Porto Alegre, Chicago, and Dublin cases presuppose functioning democratic institutions. Those conditions do not obtain in many countries where AI disruption is most severe. Governance institutions are weak, civil society organizations are politically constrained, media ecosystems are dominated by state-controlled outlets. The participatory designs must be adapted for contexts where the institutional infrastructure assumed by the original cases is absent.

Fung's response is not to abandon the participatory principle but to develop institutional designs adapted to these conditions — designs that do not presuppose the institutional infrastructure of wealthy democracies but that build governance capacity through the participatory process itself. Community-based natural resource management in developing countries provides precedent: participatory processes have been successfully implemented in communities with weak formal governance, creating new governance capacities through the practice of governing.

Origin

The specific framing emerged from Fung's December 2024 Ash Center workshop, which brought together democracy activists, social scientists, and technology specialists in joint analysis of AI's effects on democracy movements. The workshop synthesized empirical observations from multiple regional contexts into a systematic claim about the technology's asymmetric effects.

The broader tradition of analysis on which the workshop drew includes work by Larry Diamond on authoritarian resurgence, Anne Applebaum on democratic decline, and extensive research by human rights organizations on specific state uses of AI for surveillance and censorship. The workshop's contribution was integrating these analyses into a framework adequate to guide institutional response.

Key Ideas

AI amplifies already-powerful actors. Both state and corporate capacity are enhanced by AI relative to civil society and affected populations.

The asymmetry operates across regime types. Democratic and authoritarian contexts both exhibit the dynamic, though with different specific manifestations.

Democracy movements face historic decline. The combination of AI-enhanced state capacity and AI-enhanced corporate capacity has produced measurable decline in civil society's ability to challenge concentrated power.

Participatory governance must adapt. Institutional designs developed for functioning democracies require adaptation for contexts with weak institutional infrastructure.