Digital Technologies for Deliberative Democracies: Models and Applications for Continuous Civic Engagement

In the last fifty years, scholars have widely studied Deliberative Democracy and Deliberative Systems and proposed them as an alternative or integration to Rep- resentative and Participatory Democracy. The latter can on one side deal with communication challenges of diverse and pluralist modern Societies by opening Democratic procedures to Citizens and engaging them in Democratic decision- making procedures. On the other side, as like as Representative Democracies, Participatory Democracies do not promote deliberations to foster Citizens to reach a consensus on Societal issues. Indeed, Participatory Democracies are based on intrinsic mechanisms of aggregation of votes, not optimized to fulfil the diverse cog- nitive characteristics of Citizens, and are usually stand-alone processes that can not be interconnected. Gamified Online Deliberative Systems can fill these gaps. The first research goal of this work is to analyze Democracies, expose different models of them, and investigate from different perspectives the causes of the current crisis of Representative Democracies and the lack of Participatory Democracies models. The second research goal is to analyze the literature on Deliberative Democracies and Deliberative Systems in order to delineate a framework of requirements to im- plement the features needed for legitimated Deliberative Systems. The framework is then used to analyze a set of online tools for deliberation and cover the third research question: understand if these tools implement legitimacy features of on- line deliberation and can be connected to Deliberative Systems. The last research goal of this work is to investigate the cognitive characteristics of Citizens involved in deliberations and the motivations that may keep them continuously engaged in Deliberative Systems. After having exposed Gamification theories, this work proposes a fully gamified model for Online Deliberative Systems and describes a practical implementation of the model.