Large Language Models and Augmented Democracy

Abstract

Artificial intelligence enables computational agents to represent political preferences and take part in collective decision-making. In this thesis, I investigate the opportunities and challenges of digital twins (DTs) based on Large Language Models (LLMs) as intermediaries in augmented democracy, focusing on individual preference representation, collective representation of political organizations, and the vulnerability of those representations to attackers. First, using data from an online experiment in Brazil, I examine whether personalized DTs can predict citizens' preferences for unseen policy proposals. Second, I extend the DT framework from individuals to political organizations. Using Swiss parliamentary data, I build topic-specific knowledge graphs from lawmakers' legislative records and connect them to LLM-based lawmaker agents, which are organized into party-level DTs representing collective positions. Agentic deliberation among these agents tests whether aggregated party representations capture a broader range of intra-party perspectives than official party communications. Finally, I study the vulnerability and robustness of LLM-mediated deliberation against prompt-injection attacks that amplify viewpoints, suppress opinions, or redirect consensus. Using data from a 2023 deliberative experiment in the United Kingdom, I analyze how attack effectiveness varies with the distribution of opinions and rhetorical strategies, and evaluate a pipeline combining injection detection, structured opinion representations, and reinforcement learning to improve resistance. These findings characterize the opportunities and challenges of LLM-based digital twins in augmented democracy, stressing accurate preference representation, faithful aggregation, and robustness to strategic interaction.