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Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly important component of electoral politics. Political parties and candidates can use generative AI to produce and personalize campaign messages, analyze voters, automate communication, and rapidly generate visual, textual, and audiovisual content. At the same time, citizens increasingly encounter AI-generated political information and may themselves use conversational AI systems to learn about candidates, parties, policies, and elections.
This panel examines how these developments are transforming the electoral information environment and what they mean for democratic elections. Rather than treating AI exclusively as a source of manipulation or misinformation, the panel considers both its democratic opportunities and its risks. AI may lower the costs of obtaining political information, make complex policy information more accessible, facilitate political participation, and enable new forms of communication between citizens and political actors. At the same time, synthetic content, microtargeting, algorithmic bias, unequal AI literacy, opaque information sources, and increasingly personalized political communication may undermine informed choice and create new forms of electoral inequality.
The panel welcomes theoretical and empirical research examining AI from the perspectives of political actors, platforms, regulators, and citizens. Relevant questions include how campaigns adopt generative AI; whether voters recognize and respond differently to AI-generated messages; how citizens use AI assistants for electoral information; whether AI affects political knowledge, trust, polarization, persuasion, and turnout; and how regulation and disclosure requirements can protect electoral integrity without unnecessarily restricting political communication.
Comparative and cross-national contributions are particularly encouraged. Bringing together research on elections, political communication, electronic democracy, and artificial intelligence, the panel seeks to assess how AI is redistributing communicative power during elections and whether AI-mediated electoral politics ultimately strengthens or weakens citizens’ capacity to make informed democratic choices.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; elections; generative AI; political communication; campaigns; voters; electoral integrity; political information; democratic resilience
Possible Paper Themes
• Generative AI in political campaigns
• Voters’ use of ChatGPT and other AI assistants for election information
• AI-generated campaign messages and political persuasion
• Deepfakes, synthetic media, and electoral misinformation
• Disclosure and labeling of AI-generated political content
• AI literacy and voters’ ability to evaluate campaign information
• AI, political knowledge, and informed voting
• Personalized AI campaigning and microtargeting
• Regulation of AI during elections
• Cross-national differences in AI and electoral politics
• AI, trust, polarization, and turnout
• Democratic opportunities of conversational AI