What AI and digital parties are there?

Among parties that promise to open up politics with technology are Europe's "digital parties", built around online voting by members; Denmark's The Synthetic Party, which made an AI its public face; and Japan's Team Mirai, which uses AI to listen to voters' voices. This article sets them side by side, following the sources.

With the internet and AI (artificial intelligence), couldn't many more people take part in politics? Political parties born from that thought have appeared in many places. But even under the same banner of opening up politics with technology, what they aim for and how they use technology differ quite a lot from party to party. This article sets side by side three currents for which sources exist, and for each one presents who says what. It is not an article that judges which party is better.

In short

This article covers the following three currents.

Europe's "digital parties": Italy's Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, M5S), Spain's Podemos, and the Pirate Parties of Germany and other countries. They promised that members would decide "directly" through online systems [1][2].
Denmark's The Synthetic Party: it made an AI chatbot the party's face, and explains that a language model trained on the texts of small parties is to "represent" people who do not vote [3][4].
Japan's Team Mirai: a political party founded in 2025 by the AI engineer Takahiro Anno. It puts up human members of parliament and uses AI for things such as listening to voters' voices [5][6].

For example

The Five Star Movement's Rousseau. The Five Star Movement has had its members vote on candidates and policies through an online system called Rousseau. In a 2017 paper, the researcher Marco Deseriis wrote that the party's leadership presents Rousseau as "a pioneering experiment in direct democracy" [2]. The debate in Italy over this system is covered in Plurality in Italy.

The Synthetic Party's Leader Lars. This Danish party was founded in 2022, and its face is a chatbot, Leader Lars. People can talk with Leader Lars on the chat service Discord [3]. In the 2022 general election, it fell short of the 20,000 signatures needed to stand (by the party's record, it had 21), and it did not appear on the ballot [4].

Team Mirai's "interactive policy platform". In the 2025 House of Councillors election, the party used a system that let voters make proposals for its manifesto (its campaign promises) by talking with an AI. The party won 1 seat in that election [5].

In more detail

1. Deciding directly, or reworking representation?

Digital parties. In a 2019 paper, the researcher Paolo Gerbaudo examined online decision-making in the Five Star Movement and Podemos. Davide Casaleggio of the Five Star Movement had said, in effect, that such systems let members aim for full participation instead of settling for delegation [1]. Gerbaudo's conclusion is that the actual practice was "strongly plebiscitary and top-down". He writes that members' participation tended to stay at a "reactive democracy" that ratifies what has been decided above [1].

According to Gerbaudo, almost all online votes ended in overwhelming majorities of more than 80%. In Podemos there was never a vote that went against the leadership's wishes, and in the Five Star Movement members went against the leadership only twice [1]. Davide Bono, who was involved in running Rousseau for the Five Star Movement, explains this by saying that the movement has a strong collective sense of unity and that members tend to agree on the key points. Gerbaudo writes that, in addition, the leadership has influence through things such as the timing of votes and how questions are framed [1].

In the 2017 paper, Deseriis presented the Five Star Movement's vision as, taken to its conclusion, a digital direct democracy involving "the abolition of all political parties" [2]. Deseriis then analyzes Rousseau in practice as "direct parliamentarianism": members appear to be directly connected with their representatives, but the stage of discussing and forming options stays in the hands of representatives and party leaders, and members only choose among options decided elsewhere [2].

Germany's Pirate Party used a system called LiquidFeedback, a "delegative" form of voting in which you can entrust your vote to someone else (liquid democracy). There was an objection that "super-voters" who gather many delegations would undermine the democratic process. A 2015 analysis by Christoph Kling and colleagues reports that the theoretical power of super-voters was indeed large, but that in many cases they voted on the same side as the majority and had a stabilizing effect on the system [7].

The Synthetic Party. What this party puts forward is not direct voting but a reworking of how representation works. Its founder, Asker Bryld Staunæs, called "algorithmic representation" the hypothesis that a language model trained on the texts of small parties might be able to speak for the voices of people who do not vote [4]. He explains that if the party won an election, humans representing Leader Lars would be on the ballot and would act as "a medium for the AI" [3]. The "synthetic chamber" proposal by Staunæs and the researcher Michal Malý is likewise a plan to set up a standing body in parliament that is auxiliary in terms of power. It says that rather than replacing human judgment with AI, it would use multiple AI agents to structure, preserve and relay into representative democracy the reasons that come out of organized citizen deliberation [8].

Team Mirai. In the 2024 election for Governor of Tokyo, Anno's campaign put its manifesto on GitHub (a service where changes to documents can be proposed and recorded) and accepted change proposals from voters. In a look back after the election, the staff member in charge of GitHub wrote that it is difficult to use this as a tool of direct democracy. The explanation is that reaching agreement on GitHub is hard on issues involving value judgments, and that the many proposals could be integrated only because Anno held the final decision-making authority in one place. The same article also writes that it was useful as a means of two-way exchange and deliberation on policy [9].

At a press conference in July 2026, party leader Anno explained that the party's digital democracy is not about AI deciding politics, but about building a politics in which AI helps as many people as possible take part, their voices become policy, and the results can be checked [6].

2. Who leads?

In his book The Digital Party (2019), Gerbaudo argued that "platform parties" built on online systems give rise to a charismatic "hyperleader", whose name and image spread online, and a "superbase" of members who respond to the leadership's calls, and that the two connect directly while the intermediate ranks of party officials disappear. This is how Deseriis's 2020 review article summarizes it [10]. According to the same review, Gerbaudo also thinks the gap between promise and reality might be closed with a few adjustments [10].

Deseriis set up a different type, the "networked party", such as the Pirate Parties of Sweden, Germany and Iceland and the Barcelona citizens' party Barcelona en Comú. There, Deseriis writes, members take part in every stage from setting the agenda through discussion to voting, and leadership roles tend to emerge from a division of labor from below rather than from appointment from above. The view is that, in principle, this type appears to have a higher quality of internal party democracy [10].

The Synthetic Party made an AI the party's face. Staunæs criticizes "virtual politicians" that treat an AI as a human, such as SAM in New Zealand, saying that by posing as objective candidates they become authoritarian. The explanation given is that what the party values is less putting an AI at the center than how humans can make use of AI [3].

Team Mirai's leader is a human, Anno. A 2026 paper by Malý and colleagues compared 10 AI candidates and parties around the world, and described Team Mirai, which grew out of "AI Anno" in the governor's election, as having formal party status and organization, the most organized of the 10 cases. The paper writes that AI was one of the tools that helped the new party appeal to a broad range of voters. Team Mirai won 1 seat in the House of Councillors in 2025 and 11 seats in the House of Representatives in 2026 [11].

3. The lens of technopopulism

The researchers Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti defined "technopopulism", which combines appeals to expertise with appeals to "the people", as a new logic of politics overlaid on the left–right divide. As examples they give the Five Star Movement and France's La République En Marche [12].

On The Synthetic Party, a background document published by the party's side writes, citing press coverage, that the party positions itself as "techno-populist, transhumanist and a defender of radical democracy" [13]. However, this document resembles the output of an AI research tool in its format, and its details need to be checked against the original reports.

What is debated

What "direct" really means. As seen above, Gerbaudo and Deseriis point to the gap between the direct participation the digital parties promised and how things actually worked [1][2]. In response, people involved with the Five Star Movement give as the reason that members' opinions tend to agree in the first place [1]. The debate in Italy over the Five Star Movement's voting system is in the article Plurality in Italy.
Concentration of delegations. There is an objection that delegative voting concentrates power in a few people. Using data from Germany's Pirate Party, Kling and colleagues reported that the power of super-voters is large, but that most of them voted on the same side as the majority [7].
Responsibility for AI candidates. Malý and colleagues point out that in the three-way relationship between the AI, citizens and the designers behind the scenes, the designers who actually control the settings are invisible within the organization, and the AI persona bears no legal responsibility [11]. The Synthetic Party's side explains that the people who stand for election are humans, who act as mediums for the AI [3].
Criticism of Team Mirai. Malý and colleagues argue that AI political actors challenge the very premise that political parties connect citizens with politics, and write that even in Team Mirai, the most institutionalized case, the AI aspect is not an add-on to the organization but forms the basis of its claim to representation [11]. Other outside criticisms, such as how much the gathered proposals were actually used and the makeup of its support, together with the party's explanations, are collected in the article on Team Mirai.
Where the writers stand. Malý is Staunæs's co-author, and 7 of the 10 cases in the paper by Malý and colleagues were selected from participants in Synthetic Summit, an exhibition that Staunæs organized [11]. Hirokazu Nishio, who appears in the next section, is introduced in a record by Staunæs and Malý as "one of Team Mirai's principal technical contributors" [14].

A dialogue between the people involved

In slides for a talk in September 2026, Hirokazu Nishio writes that, after discussions with Staunæs, Nishio felt that almost all of those European parties regard direct democracy as a good thing. On the other hand, Nishio writes that Team Mirai has presumably ("ないはず", there should be no such case) never made a campaign promise to "直接民主制を実現する" (realize direct democracy), and that this apparently came as a surprise to them. Nishio notes that this is from memory, and that the talk is not the party's opinion [15].

In the same slides, Nishio says, as a personal view, that majority voting is merely a problematic way of aggregating from an age when only "足し算" (addition) was possible. Because most people are not interested in most issues, deciding yes or no by direct democracy means the result is decided by the mood of the media and social media. The claim is that AI should make it possible for the opinions of people who have opinions to count as something other than "意見のない人と同等の1票" (one vote equal to that of a person with no opinion) [15].

Note that the sources do not make clear how far Nishio's "those European parties" extends. Within the sources looked at in this article, the ones that openly promised direct participation were the Five Star Movement, Podemos and others, while The Synthetic Party's own documents speak of reworking representation [1][4].

Where it fits in Plurality

Chapter 5-4 of Plurality, "Augmented Deliberation", presents Anno's campaign in the 2024 governor's election as an example of publishing a manifesto and gathering voters' opinions, making those opinions visible with Talk to the City, and refining policy on GitHub [16]. The same chapter writes that an AI model trained on the texts of a community could act as that group's representative and might serve as an aid, complement or check on the judgment of the person meant to represent it, and gives The Synthetic Party as an example. This paragraph was added through a change proposal that the party's founder himself submitted to the book's GitHub [16][17].

Delegative voting (liquid democracy) is covered in chapter 5-6 of the book, "⿻ Voting". The same chapter also notes that liquid democracy can give rise to concentrations of power [18].

Sources

Paolo Gerbaudo, "Are digital parties more democratic than traditional parties? Evaluating Podemos and Movimento 5 Stelle's online decision-making platforms" (Party Politics, 2019) — https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068819884878
Marco Deseriis, "Direct Parliamentarianism: An Analysis of the Political Values Embedded in Rousseau, the 'Operating System' of the Five Star Movement" (JeDEM, 2017) — https://doi.org/10.29379/jedem.v9i2.471 ［CC BY］
Chloe Xiang, "This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI" (Vice, 2022-10-13) — https://www.vice.com/en/article/this-danish-political-party-is-led-by-an-ai/
The Syntheticist Papers, "Interviews" — https://syntheticism.org/content/7interviews.html ［CC0］
Broad Listening, chapter 6, section 1 "Team Mirai's Efforts in the 2025 House of Councillors Election" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/06_01_team_mirai.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
Team Mirai, "1,100人がスマホで投票した日──チームみらい第1回党大会の舞台裏" (The day 1,100 people voted by smartphone: behind the scenes of Team Mirai's first party convention) (in Japanese) — https://note.com/team_mirai_jp/n/n2092f0dc600d
Christoph Carl Kling and others, "Voting Behaviour and Power in Online Democracy: A Study of LiquidFeedback in Germany's Pirate Party" (ICWSM 2015) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07723
Michal Malý and Asker Bryld Staunæs, "Synthetic chamber: agentic mediation in representative democracy" (AI & Society, 2026, abstract) — https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03110-w ［CC BY 4.0］
Takahiro Anno's campaign staff, "選挙でGitHubを使うことに意味はあったのか？――GitHubを用いた政策リポジトリの公開について振り返る" (Was there any point in using GitHub in an election? Looking back on publishing a policy repository on GitHub) (2024-07-18, in Japanese) — https://note.com/annotakahiro24/n/nef45fab195ea
Marco Deseriis, "Two Variants of the Digital Party: The Platform Party and The Networked Party" (Partecipazione e conflitto, 2020) — https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v13i1p896 ［CC BY-NC-SA 3.0］
Michal Malý, Giulia Sandri and Oscar Barberà, "Synthetic political actors: an exploration into emerging AI-driven candidates and parties" (Open Research Europe, 2026) — https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.23686.1 ［CC BY 4.0］
Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics (Oxford University Press, 2021, publisher's abstract) — https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807766.001.0001
The Syntheticist Papers, "Genesis of The Synthetic Party" — https://syntheticism.org/content/genesis.html ［CC0］
Asker Bryld Staunæs and Michal Malý, "Interview with Nishio Hirokazu (Team Mirai)" (Zenodo, 2026-07-16, text not public) — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21395972 ［CC BY 4.0］
Hirokazu Nishio, "大勢の声を聞く技術は人の自由を増やすのか？" (Do technologies for listening to many voices increase people's freedom?), talk slides (2026-09-13, in Japanese) — https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/m0sl9gyndlpnytoczx6e0/2026_.pdf?rlkey=vittdaeqn0yv8tjytiszk7dp6&dl=0
Plurality, 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/ ［CC0］
pluralitybook/plurality PR #939 — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/pull/939 ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-6 "⿻ Voting" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/ ［CC0］

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