Emily Kubin
Publications
AI and Collective Decisions: Strengthening Legitimacy and Losers' Consent
AI is increasingly used to scale collective decision-making, but far less attention has been paid to how such systems can support procedural legitimacy, particularly the conditions shaping losers' consent: whether participants who do not get their preferred outcome still accept it as fair. We ask: (1) how can AI help ground collective decisions in participants' different experiences and beliefs, and (2) whether exposure to these experiences can increase trust, understanding, and social cohesion even when people disagree with the outcome. We built a system that uses a semi-structured AI interviewer to elicit personal experiences on policy topics and an interactive visualization that displays predicted policy support alongside those voiced experiences. In a randomized experiment (n = 181), interacting with the visualization increased perceived legitimacy, trust in outcomes, and understanding of others' perspectives, even though all participants encountered decisions that went against their stated preferences. Our hope is that the design and evaluation of this tool spurs future researchers to focus on how AI can help not only achieve scale and efficiency in democratic processes, but also increase trust and connection between participants.
Agora: Teaching the Skill of Consensus-Finding with AI Personas Grounded in Human Voice
Deliberative democratic theory suggests that civic competence: the capacity to navigate disagreement, weigh competing values, and arrive at collective decisions is not innate but developed through practice. Yet opportunities to cultivate these skills remain limited, as traditional deliberative processes like citizens' assemblies reach only a small fraction of the population. We present Agora, an early-stage AI-powered platform that uses LLMs to organize authentic human voices on policy issues, helping users build consensus-finding skills by proposing and revising policy recommendations, hearing supporting and opposing perspectives, and receiving feedback on how policy changes affect predicted support. In a preliminary study with 44 university students, participants using the full interface (with access to voice explanations) reported higher levels of problem-solving skills, internal deliberation, and produced higher quality consensus statements compared to a control condition showing only aggregate support distributions. These initial findings point toward a promising direction for scaling civic education.
Agora: Teaching the Skill of Consensus-Finding with AI Personas Grounded in Human Voice
Deliberative democratic theory suggests that civic competence: the capacity to navigate disagreement, weigh competing values, and arrive at collective decisions is not innate but developed through practice. Yet opportunities to cultivate these skills remain limited, as traditional deliberative processes like citizens' assemblies reach only a small fraction of the population. We present Agora, an AI-powered platform that uses LLMs to organize authentic human voices on policy issues, helping users build consensus-finding skills by proposing and revising policy recommendations, hearing supporting and opposing perspectives, and receiving feedback on how policy changes affect predicted support. In a preliminary study with 44 university students, access to the full interface with voice explanations, as opposed to aggregate support distributions alone, significantly improved self-reported perspective-taking and the extent to which statements acknowledged multiple viewpoints. These findings point toward a promising direction for scaling civic education.