Technology and Democracy

The three books featured in this Global Perspectives review symposium – Stein Ringen’s How Democracies Live; Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and its Discontents; and Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor’s Degenerations of Democracy – each raise important and urgent concerns about the fate of liberal democracy, especially in the United States. This essay argues that policymakers must focus on the interplay between democracy and technology to stimulate democratic renewal in the 21st century. Technology must be democratized through new regulatory and policy approaches to deliver the benefits of broadband internet access as widely as possible. And democracy must be technologized by leveraging new frontiers in artificial intelligence, blockchain and other advanced technologies to improve democratic accountability, public goods provision and state capacity.