Automation, Legislative Production and Modernization of the Legislative Machine: The New Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence Applied to Law and e-Democracy Gianluigi FIORIGLIO Sapienza Unviersità di Roma - Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche (Italy) Abstract. Electronic democracy is still far from being realized and several issues must be solved in order to make it possible. The quantitative problem of popu- lar participation is one of them, but it can be mitigated through automation. This Chapter proposes two main applications that may help building a multilevel digital agora where demos, lawmakers, governments, and public administration may co- operate. The first is related to the integration, in each platform used for this purpose, of specific decision support systems. The second is inherent in the use of IT tools that, integrated into a digital agora, allow to transform the multiplicity of individual contributions into a general will. Keywords. e-democracy, lawmaking, artificial intelligence, digital agora 1. Introduction ‘Electronic democracy’ (or e-democracy or digital democracy) may be studied from var- ious viewpoints: law, sociology, computer science, philosophy, etc. However, there is no unambiguous notion of e-democracy; moreover, sometimes technology is seen as harm- ful for democracy and other times as a panacea for its problems. Thus, we can look at e-democracy ranging from exciting utopias to frightening dystopias, but both extremes are misleading. It is more useful to study e-democracy without forgetting that its core is ‘democracy’, not ‘electronic’. Thus, a previous in-depth analysis of its foundations as a democracy is needed to build upon a theoretical model of e-democracy. On the ba- sis of such brief and preliminary observation, it may appear clear the perspective from which e-democracy is seen here, taking into account a model in which the technological component is secondary to the theoretical and conceptual ones. Hence it could be defined as a new form of representative democracy in which tools of direct, deliberative, and participatory democracy are institutionalized; they can allow the exercise of popular sovereignty with advisory and legislative powers as appropriated. Knowledge of the Law in the Big Data Age G. Peruginelli and S. Faro (Eds.) © 2019 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/FAIA190007 54