Research under guidance of Dr. Christian Houle

Proposal-

This project investigates and produces technology aimed at reducing epistemic barriers to democratic deliberation. At our current place in politics, there is a strong gap between the public and policymakers and their access to scholarly literatures exploring hard conflicts. We attempt to use technology to craft what could be an interesting contrast to what is available and used today, inspired by maximalist conceptions of democracy revealed by Dahl in that democracies demand active political contestation and well-informed citizens.

The system is a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture that ingests curated political science research on a domain, allows users to prompt in natural language, returns answers with mandatory academic citations, and makes nuance in social science visible by exposing contestation in fields rather than flattening competing explanatory theories to a single answer. We establish clear metrics for assessing deliberative quality, evidence engagement, and belief revision for each literature used to train the software, with the experiment of comparing reasoning quality through complex, oftentimes contested literature on political science, economy, and history.

We are inspired by the perils of democratic backsliding occurring throughout the world. Combined with intense polarizations, religious conflicts, and economic populism, there is deep uncertainty and cultural skepticism about the fate of liberalism throughout many democratic countries. We have hypothesized on the existence of precise economic, technological, and cultural thresholds where modernization theory and even broader literature on democratic stability begins to revert, and whether modernization thresholds predict increased susceptibility to populism before stabilizing democracy. A structured, high-quality data set of understanding the arguments and main contentions between political science papers is essential for achieving technology that offers most utility for conceptualizing and understanding political events.