Purpose
AI presents an opportunity to accelerate improvements to our democratic practices. But what exactly does that look like? What specifically should we research, fund, and build? This map aims to help answer those questions. It highlights what we believe are critical capabilities for democratic processes to address needs for democratic governance of AI, mitigate power concentration, and facilitate cooperation (even internationally). These capabilities are also valuable for decision-making across the many other challenges that we face across every level of society.
Our Thesis goes into more detail on the bigger picture and our Democracy Levels Framework provided a foundation for this map.
Who contributed to this?
Steering Group: Aviv Ovadya, Kyle Redman, Luke Thorburn
Core Contributors: Sammy McKinney, Eloïse Gabadou Santiago, Flynn Devine, Quan Ze Chen, Shannon Hong, Oliver Smith
Contributors: Nabila Abbas, Fazl Barez, Alex Bleakley, Matt Byrne, Ieva Česnulaitytė, Stephanie Chan, Yves Dejaeghere, Joe Edelman, David Evan Harris, Andrew Konya, Scott Lappan-Newton, Evan Shapiro, Iain Walker, and Jessica Yu
How should it be cited?
AI & Democracy Foundation (2026). Democratic Capabilities Gap Map. democracybuild.org [BibTeX]
What is the goal?
Key actors, making consequential decisions (especially on AI), have access to processes that are representative, informed, substantive, deliberative, robust, and legible. These actors might be governments, multinational partnerships, global regulators or corporations. The deliberative processes and systems they enable will vary depending on their purpose and context. We need the toolbox for each of the possible combinations.
How does the map work?
This Democratic Capabilities Gap Map is intended to track the work required to improve representative deliberative democratic processes (see the about page for details).
It is backed by a database with relationships between: Dimensions, Capabilities, Resources, Goals, Research Questions and Product Gaps.
This map is categorized by the high-level dimensions that describe key outcomes of deliberative processes, for example, that participants become informed. Within each dimension is a subset of capabilities that contribute to delivering these outcomes, for example, that one can curate the context needed to sufficiently inform participants. Not all of these capabilities will be relevant to every deliberative process, but this is intended to be a relatively comprehensive set of the capabilities likely to be necessary.
The core part of this resource is a database laying out the gaps and goals for deliberative processes, exploring the existing practice and where and how we can push this space to another level of scale and impact. This data was gathered over two years from extensive research, interviews and workshops with deliberative practitioners and tech builders, and builds on the extensive experience of our team in these fields.
The database also includes lists of proposed products and research questions. These ideas have varying levels of impact and resource requirements. We hope they provide a rolling start for anyone looking to make a contribution.
How do we decide what to include in the map?
The AI & Democracy Foundation team manually curated the content, and it goes through a round of review before publication, including with subject matter experts where needed.
Many contributors across a variety of fields and backgrounds provided suggestions and expertise.
All of the core content was manually written and curated by subject matter experts; AI has been used for quality control, copy editing, and web development.
How did we make these assessments?
Several key contributors drew on their deep experience with deliberative democratic processes across governments, AI organizations, public utilities, and peacebuilding. We estimated the threshold representing “good enough” across key dimensions and capabilities such that stakeholders would sufficiently buy-in and that processes would be capable of successfully operating in high-stakes scenarios.
They are subjective assessments — we are far from consensus on them even within the AI & Democracy Foundation. They are intended as starting points for debate, not definitive judgments. We think making an opinionated call on these ratings is useful for all stakeholders and in the spirit of Cunningham’s Law, we welcome feedback.
How did we choose this rating system?
We want the ratings to support two uses:
- Roadmapping: Understanding where we are now and what needs to happen to get where we want.
- Prioritizing: Making decisions about what needs to be done first.
To do this we’ve adopted common assessment criteria from other similar endeavours:
- Maturity: How good is current practice compared to what we think is required?
- Importance: How much would the overall quality of deliberative processes suffer if this capability did not mature?
- Neglectedness: To what extent is this capability lacking resources and attention?
- Opportunity: To what extent can additional resourcing (people, attention, $, etc.) improve maturity?
- Transnational: How well can this currently work for a global/transnational process?
Why deliberative democracy?
To be updated when thesis is finished.
You can read the full version of our thesis here.
Funding opportunities
This map is a direct call for funders who are looking to invest strategically at the frontiers of AI governance and democratic decision-making. We have identified more than a dozen high-impact, underserved market gaps, where any funding would unlock a new path for how we collectively make decisions around AI. This map gives you direct resources to high-impact, underserved capabilities.
Contact donate@ai-democracy.org.
How do I contribute?
This map is intended to be a living document for the ecosystem, and we very much encourage contributions, including additions, suggested changes, and higher-level feedback. Our team will review contributions and update the map periodically. Contributors will also optionally be attributed in the list of contributors.
We also invite researchers and teams to share their interest in addressing one of these gaps by reaching out to , so that emerging efforts can be made visible and potential collaborations can take shape.
Want to stay up to date with significant changes?
This work is meant to evolve as a shared resource. We encourage you to:
- Stay connected as updates are made by subscribing to the AI & Democracy Foundation Substack and opt in to Gap Map updates.
- We will regularly track the details of updates to the database in the Updates section of the site.