Towards Effective EU E-Participation: The Development of AskThePublic

2025-04-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the inefficiency in opinion analysis and insufficient interactivity in EU public policy consultation. To this end, we designed and implemented AskThePublic—an AI-augmented platform built upon the EU’s “Have Your Say” system. Grounded in media richness theory and the design science research (DSR) methodology, the platform introduces a multilingual, role-adaptive government chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs), enabling explainable, structured parsing of public input within policy contexts and supporting interactive, context-aware retrieval. Evaluation via semi-structured interviews with 11 users demonstrates significant improvements in user engagement—particularly in interactivity, response structuring, and cross-lingual support. The work contributes a scalable, reusable AI-enabled paradigm for digital democracy, advancing both theoretical integration (media richness + DSR) and practical implementation of participatory governance.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

E-participation platforms can be an important asset for governments in increasing trust and fostering democratic societies. By engaging non-governmental and private institutions, domain experts, and even the general public, policymakers can make informed and inclusive decisions. Drawing on the Media Richness Theory and applying the Design Science Research method, we explore how a chatbot can be designed to improve the effectiveness of the policy-making process of existing citizen involvement platforms. Leveraging the Have Your Say platform, which solicits feedback on European Commission initiatives and regulations, a Large Language Model based chatbot, called AskThePublic is created, providing policymakers, journalists, researchers, and interested citizens with a convenient channel to explore and engage with public input. By conducting 11 semistructured interviews, the results show that the participants value the interactive and structured responses as well as enhanced language capabilities, thus increasing their likelihood of engaging with AskThePublic over the existing platform. An outlook for future iterations is provided and discussed with regard to the perspectives of the different stakeholders.

Problem

• Designing a chatbot to enhance policy-making via e-participation platforms
• Improving public engagement in EU decision-making through AI technology
• Evaluating chatbot effectiveness for structured citizen feedback analysis

Innovation

• LLM-based chatbot for policy-making engagement
• Design Science Research method application
• Interactive structured responses enhance participation