Much of the agenda focused on specific proposals answering ten basic questions, including:

• Which sources should AI chatbots draw information from?
• Should AI chatbots use the user’s past conversations to improve user experience?
• Should AI chatbots use the user’s online activity to personalize interactions?
• Should AI chatbots be designed to be human-like?
• Should users be allowed to use AI chatbots for romantic relationships?

The deliberators in each country were convened on the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, developed by the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team. This platform is AI-assisted and moderates video-based discussions in small groups of ten. 

Participants noted a generally positive impact of AI, with an increase in positive perceptions post-forum. "This shift in viewpoint, especially notable among those previously unfamiliar with AI, underscores the value of informed discussion in shaping public opinion," remarked Alice Siu, Senior Research Scholar at FSI and Associate Director of the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab.

The forum's methodical approach, with deliberations in 166 small groups and a separate control group for each country, ensured that the outcomes accurately reflected the effects of the deliberative process. Findings indicated that users and non-users of AI began to bridge their differences, aligning closer in their attitudes towards AI after the forum.

Siu also emphasized the significance of the event’s feedback, noting that "the high ratings from participants affirm the forum’s success in making complex discussions accessible and relevant. It is an encouraging sign for the future of democratic engagement with technology."

The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab is dedicated to deepening our understanding of deliberative democracy processes and their application to critical contemporary issues like AI. The insights from this forum will inform ongoing research and policy recommendations, ensuring that AI evolves in a manner that considers diverse values and voices across the globe.

The project report is available below:

For detailed information on the forum’s conclusions or forthcoming projects, please reach out to James Fishkin (Director, Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab) or Alice Siu (Associate Director, Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab) or visit the Deliberative Democracy Lab website.

There’s a great deal of support for community policing, but not a lot of concrete data on whether it works. What makes this a challenging issue to study?

Christia: Building trust between police and the citizens they are tasked to protect is at the core of community policing. As such, an important challenge lies with identifying the right measures to capture this often-complex police-citizen interaction. This was even more of a pronounced challenge in our study as we conducted six coordinated experiments across a diverse set of sites in the Global South in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uganda.

To make progress in understanding the impacts of community policing, we needed to develop a set of common strategies for the police to implement that made sense in each national context, which we call locally appropriate community policing interventions. We also needed to agree upon a shared research design across countries and to introduce common outcome measures to ensure that we were looking at the impacts of these programs in similar ways. This approach to launching coordinated, multi-site, randomized controlled trials across contexts has been pioneered by the organization that sponsored this work, Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP).

Your team partnered with six communities across the Global South in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uganda. Based on your research, what evidence did you find for or against the use of community policing practices?

Blair: We find that community policing doesn’t live up to its promise when implemented in the Global South. Community policing doesn’t build trust between citizens and police, it doesn’t lead to citizens to share the kinds of tips and information with police that might improve police efficiency, and, perhaps not surprisingly then, it does not lead to lower crime. This disappointing result was apparent across all six contexts and for all of the primary outcomes we measured.

Is there an alternative to community policing, or ways to reform these systems, that would make them more efficacious at creating the desired outcomes?

Weinstein: We carefully examined each of the six contexts, including through interviews with the police agencies and the research teams, to make sense of this null result. We identified three primary constraints that may have impeded the implementation of community policing: (a) a lack of prioritization of these new practices by police leadership (b) the rotation to new posts of police officers who had championed the effort and were trained to implement it and (c) limited resources to follow up on the concerns raised by citizens.

The bottom line is that community policing isn’t positioned to deliver increased trust and collaboration in environments with limited incentives and resources to enable police to change their behavior. Our conclusion is that community policing should be seen as an incremental reform that can make a difference in well-resourced police departments with strong incentives to be responsive to citizen concerns. But when those conditions are absent, an incremental approach can’t deliver. More systemic reforms are required.

How does the data from your work fit into broader issues of equity, just representation, and racism that communities across the world continue to grapple with?

Blair: In many ways community policing appears to be the ideal policy for this moment, where so many are demanding that police abuse be reduced while also reducing crime victimization. Community policing is meant to do both, constructing a virtuous cycle between citizen-police cooperation, trust, and crime reduction. Our null results sound a note of caution: it may not be so simple. We observed big barriers to implementing this shift in policing, and barriers that likely affect other incremental policies. To address equity in the way governments enforce the law, we may need more systematic changes to how we organize the police and hold them accountable.   

This week we launched the long-awaited 17th year of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law's Draper Hills Summer Fellowship Program. Founded in 2005 with generous support from Bill and Phyllis Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills, Draper Hills is an executive training program for world leaders striving to promote democracy. For the next two weeks, Fellows will participate in workshops led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty to study new theories and approaches to democratic development.

Fellows in the class of 2021 were selected from among thousands of applicants for their ground-breaking work to defend democracy. These 34 leaders drawn from 30 countries around the world are pioneering new approaches and models to advance social and political change in some of the most challenging global contexts. Representing business, government, and the nonprofit sector, our fellows are working on the frontlines of democratic change to combat the global rise of authoritarianism and populism. In countries moving towards democracy, our fellows are working to institutionalize new systems and practices to support democratic transitions.

An Unconventional Year

Traditionally, Fellows would travel from their home countries to the U.S. and spend three weeks on campus at Stanford learning together. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the program is currently taking place virtually for the first time (for the same reasons, the program did not run in 2020). The shift to online programming posed a number of logistical obstacles – from what time to run virtual sessions when participants span over a dozen time zones to how to foster the sense of belonging and personal connections that occur more naturally in in-person settings.

To begin addressing the latter, Fellows were sent welcome packages to build excitement and foster community both within the program and at Stanford. Upon receiving hers, Aisha Yesufu of Nigeria shared, "I am so excited at the different people I'll be meeting from all over the world, and also learning from different people, lecturers, professors... It's going to be quite interesting, and, for me, that is what I am most looking forward to."

"One of the most important things I have ever been involved with."

Opening against the backdrop of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the importance of the Draper Hills program and the need to promote democratic change is now more evident than ever.

The inaugural session for the 2021 cohort began with Francis Fukuyama introducing the fellows to several of the esteemed faculty they will be learning from over the next two weeks, including Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and Michael McFaul. McFaul shared that not only did he found the program, but "it is one of the most important things I have ever been involved with." Jensen later added that "participating in this program is one of the great pleasures I have every year."

More to Come

Throughout the next two weeks, our Draper Hills Fellows will examine the political development, democratic transitions, and the relationship of law to economic development, public administration, administrative law, transitional justice, food security, and global health policy, among others. The group is eager to learn, and we look forward to seeing the many great things the training they receive here will enable them to do in their home countries and beyond.