Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

As the Basque Government moves to pass a new Transparency Law this May, it is redefining what transparency means. No longer just about access to information, the law embeds collaborative governance into its core, requiring that decision-making processes be open, traceable, and shaped with others. This piece explores what it looks like to turn participation from a principle into a legal obligation, and what it takes to make participation a structured, accountable part of how policy is made.

A new entry in our Rethinking Regulation series, this in-depth case study by Dane Gambrell includes an interview with Reeve Bull, who led the state’s regulatory modernization effort. It traces how Virginia used AI to review decades of accumulated rules, cut regulatory requirements by over a third, and make them clearer and more accessible. It shows how governments can pair strong institutional processes with AI to modernize regulation and improve how it works for the public.

A mayor presents a plan, residents push back, and everyone leaves frustrated, not because people weren’t heard, but because listening and engagement happened at the wrong moment. This piece reframes participation as a cycle: listening to set the agenda, engagement to shape decisions, and follow-through to prove input mattered. The example of St. Louis shows how sequencing these stages turns public input into real outcomes, with AI enabling reflection on input at scale.