How to Detect and Measure the AI Dangers to Democracy

2026-06-14

AI Summary

This study addresses the current lack of a systematic approach to identifying, prioritizing, and cross-domain comparison of risks posed by artificial intelligence to democratic processes, particularly concerning accountability gaps and governance failures. The work innovatively models AI-induced threats to democracy as a principal–agent problem and integrates the NIST AI Risk Management Framework with the seven principles of trustworthy AI to develop an analytical framework centered on “institutional assessability.” By employing domain-specific indicators, this framework empirically measures AI’s impact on democracy across information ecosystems, electoral systems, and public administration. It enables operational identification of accountability deficits and quantification of associated risks, thereby informing policy design, while also exposing the limitations of existing approaches in handling normative value judgments.

Abstract

Research on artificial intelligence and democracy has grown quickly over the last decade. A shared conclusion in this literature is that AI does not create new democratic problems so much as it makes old ones worse. We now see this across information ecosystems, in elections, and in public administration. However, despite growing evidence, we lack a clear way to prioritize risks in this area, compare them across domains, and identify where democratic control is most likely to break down. So, our problem is: How can we systematize the problems that AI systems pose to democratic processes? This paper argues that principal agent theory may fit the task. In many phases of democratic systems, principals delegate key functions to AI systems and their providers without really being able to monitor how these systems operate or the outputs they produce. Treating AI as a delegation problem helps identify accountability gaps and other governance failures. Most importantly, as we shall illustrate, it provides metrics for empirical assessments of AI impact on democracy. As a second analytical element, we draw on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and its seven characteristics of trustworthy AI, which supply substantive criteria for evaluating delegated tasks. Operationalized across the three domains through measurable indicators and domain specific trustworthiness criteria, we propose an analytical framework that centers on institutional assessability as the central condition for democratic control over AI. However, we stress that how severe a harm is, and how much risk is acceptable, are evaluative judgments that current methodologies neither acknowledge nor operationalize. This becomes acute when such evaluative judgments are (silently) delegated to private vendors. We identify this as a strong limitation left for future work.

Problem

• AI risks
• democracy
• principal-agent theory
• accountability gaps
• trustworthy AI

Innovation

• principal-agent theory
• institutional assessability
• AI risk management
• trustworthy AI
• democratic governance