And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Hal Xu, whose interest is in the Democratic governance of artificial intelligence. To what extent do citizens participate in this process? Participatory governance is critical here, but there are few pathways towards this, and in countries like the US, citizen trust in government institutions is very low to begin with, further discouraging such participation.
There are two key structural asymmetries here: information asymmetry between AI providers and users; and power asymmetry between corporations, governments, and other elites on the one hand, and the citizens who provide data to these platforms and use the AI tools on the other.
This project explored these issues by examining people’s objective, subjective, and experiential knowledge and their correlations with attitudes towards AI and willingness to engage in AI governance; and the role of populist attitudes in moderating such views. This was done with groups of some 500 citizens each in the US, Spain, and Australia.
It found that objective knowledge (actual knowledge) was negatively associated with attitudes towards AI and AI governance; conversely, subjective knowledge (potentially unfounded confidence in one’s own knowledge) and AI experience were both positively associated with such attitudes. Populist attitudes were more likely to correlate with greater willingness for governance engagement, potentially as this as seen as an anti-elite form of action.
Such patterns were also somewhat different across the three countries, of course; in the US, informed populists were more likely to withdraw from government engagement, for instance. Overall, though, promoting greater factual knowledge of AI does not necessarily lead to greater engagement, but might inadvertently suppress participation. Confidence and direct experience with AI might instead lead to greater participation, but in that case not necessarily by well-informed citizens, which causes its own problems. There is a need to pair knowledge with genuine empowerment, then.
