International Workshop on Reimagining Democracy 2025
“Democracy and a Fair Economy in the Age of AI”
December 9-10, 2025 – Yale University, New Haven, CT USA
General Information:
IWORD is an interdisciplinary workshop on reimagining democracy. We mean this very broadly. The idea is to start from scratch, to pretend we’re unencumbered by the past and—crucially—that we don’t have any unique interests to perturb our thinking. Electoral representative democracy was the best form of government mid-eighteenth century politicians technology could invent. The twenty-first century is a very different place technically, scientifically, and philosophically. What could democracy look like if it were reinvented today? Would it even be democracy—what comes after democracy?
The workshop brings together a unique interdisciplinary mix of academics, writers, public servants, journalists, futurists, and idea entrepreneurs to suggest, develop, and debate ideas equal to our present and to the future, as best we can see it.
The Workshop does not have a formal paper submission process. Participation in the Workshop is by invitation. Everybody who attends also participates in the discussion. Invited scholars do not need to prepare a new manuscript for the Workshop; rather, they are encouraged to present their current (or their favorite, or their most representative) research, which—given the eclectic and engaging nature of the group—usually stimulates interesting discussions, and has frequently generated new joint research projects.
The special theme of this year’s IWORD conference is Democracy and a Fair Economy in the Age of AI. The organizers are Hélène Landemore (Yale University), Kevin Elliott (Yale University), and Bruce Schneier (Harvard Kennedy School).
Some questions to think about, both in general and in relation to this year’s theme:
- Starting from scratch, what is today’s ideal government structure? How many and what kinds of checks & balances make sense? How much power should single leaders have? Are composite bodies like legislatures too slow and unwieldy for modern governance, or does their higher throughput capacity and diversity offset such concerns? How should we understand the legitimacy of the administrative state? What democratic innovations are available for rethinking the structure of executives?
- Today’s democracies distribute power and authority mostly by election, allowing mass electorates to publicly accept or reject the claims of candidates to represent them. Can randomly selected citizens or unelected technocrats claim to represent the people in a similar way? What could make unelected representatives legitimate?
- Are there better ways to identify public problems than through electoral
competition and civil society activities? Is there a role for AI systems to improve this process by sorting through crowd-sourced forms of input, such as online deliberative forums or issue-specific instant voting? - Can the outputs of AI systems be legitimately integrated into democratic
processes? If so, how, and where in the process of policy formation? For instance, if an AI system could find the optimal solution for balancing every voter’s preferences, would it still make sense to have representatives—or would inputting our goals and preferences be enough? - Can we reimagine democracy without reimagining the economy? What would that imply at the firm level, the state level, the global level?
- Corporate governance reform is one of the levers we can use to bring about a fairer economy. What would it mean to internally democratize bureaucratic organizations, especially private corporations? How can legacy approaches to non-autocratic corporate governance like unions, co-determination, or sectoral bargaining advance democracy today? What can we learn from the socialist tradition about cooperative and socially responsible institutional forms?
- Attention is arguably the most valuable resource in today’s economy, but
attention is also necessary for democratic government. What are the democratic implications of modern information technologies that enable, and giant companies that profit from, the industrial scale harvesting of human attention? Is democracy possible in the new attention economy? What educational reforms are needed to prepare tomorrow’s citizens for the age of AI? - The size of contemporary political units ranges from a few people in a room to vast nation-states and alliances. Within one country, what might the smaller units be—and how do they relate to one another? In today’s technologically mediated world, is there a role for non-territorial forms of intermediate political organization? What does the future of political parties look like, if they have one?
- Who has a voice in the government? What does “citizen” mean today, and what roles do they play in social institutions? What about children? Animals? Future people (and animals)? Corporations? The land?
This is just a start. The workshop welcomes all ideas, big and small, on how to reimagine democracy for this century.
Dates and Location:
IWORD runs for two days, Tuesday and Wednesday, December 9 and 10, 2025, with an informal pre-conference dinner on the evening of Monday, December 8.
Day 1 of the workshop will take place on the Yale University campus at Henry R. Luce Hall located at 34 Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut.
Day 2 of the workshop will take place at the Yale Humanities Quadrangle located at 320 York Street in New Haven, Connecticut.
Format:
Everyone is expected to give a short talk/presentation on some aspect of the workshop topic. Participants will be grouped into panels, with ample time for questions and conversations. We’ll have a welcome reception the night before, and dinners both nights; moreover, the conference will be catered on-site. The goal is to maximize opportunities for cross-fertilization.
IWORD 2025 Sponsorship:
This conference is being hosted through the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University with funding support from:
- The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.
- The Democratic Innovations Program at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS)
- Google DeepMind
Other Years’ Workshops:
For links to workshops from other years, see the IWORD Home Page.