The overarching argument of this paper is that parliamentary digital transformation is a relatively underfunded area of work, but a vitally important one in achieving the very common overarching goals of open, accountable, inclusive and participative government. Improvements in how parliamentary digital capacity building can be done better are possible with better strategy, funding and cooperation, and when parliaments are enthusiastic and willing to take the opportunities offered to them to improve themselves.
Now more than ever, digital transformation has become essential for parliaments. Such transformation can have a significant impact in making parliaments more transparent and accountable and can enable them to leverage greater public interest and engagement in the legislative and electoral processes.
Good external digital engagement requires parliaments to review their own internal digital structures, assess where development and investment are needed, and how digital improvement will assist in achieving their goals. Differential priorities in the needs of the parliament or societal actors can form a guide, according to which specific areas for digital development might be prioritised. These steps require long-term investment, which should go in parallel with the digital transformation of the Executive. However, because a country’s digital transformation is primarily the preserve of the Executive, it can bypass the legislature and may be almost disproportionately influenced by the ruling party. Uneven digital transformation between public bodies and the legislature may weaken the profile and legitimacy of the legislature itself. Furthermore, governments that effectively restrict digital development within the legislature are essentially restricting democratic integrity.
Besides the long-term process of building and developing infrastructure, short-term pilot projects can be useful to test approaches and begin building the digital infrastructure of the future. Properly targeted funding, to achieve specified digital transformation goals, agreed in collaboration with the development agencies operating in target areas, can yield significant dividends in improving the digital democracy ecosystem. This approach can neutralise harmful, short-termist and wasteful approaches to digital deficiency, and remove the ability of the more unscrupulous parliaments to play development agencies off against each other to leverage greater rewards or resources.
Digital transformation of parliaments requires better strategy, funding and cooperation on the part of donors and implementers as parliaments are enthusiastic and willing to take the opportunities offered by digitalisation.
Header photo: Jessica Taylor / UK Parliament
What's it all about?
Report authors Julia Keutgen and Rebecca Rumbol discuss their report and its key arguments
Westminster Foundation for Democracy’s (WFD) Democratic Resilience in a Digital World Programme (1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025, £130,000) aimed to build WFD’s evidence base on if, how and why digital approaches to democracy support can make a meaningful difference, and likewise, what to avoid. It sought to understand how digital technologies can enhance democratic processes and how to do so effectively while avoiding unintended consequences, as well as how WFD should respond to digital threats to democracy. This Paper summarises insights from across the programme – its intended audience includes WFD staff, other democracy support organisations, donors, policymakers, political parties, civil society, researchers, and anyone interested in using digital tools to support democratic outcomes.
The programme had a single learning-oriented goal: to generate practical lessons for the democracy support sector. It pursued this through two main pathways: piloting projects to test the positive impact of digital technologies on democratic practices and political inclusion, and fostering collaboration and learning between these pilots and WFD’s existing digital work. Activities were grouped into three categories: pilot projects, real-time learning, and research.
Post-legislative scrutiny (PLS) is a systematic and structured process through which parliaments review the implementation and impact of legislation. It is a tool that allows parliaments to get a holistic view of the operation and impact of legislation, understand what worked well and what did not, and identify the best way forward in ensuring that legislation has the impact as intended.
In its narrow sense, PLS looks at the implementation of the law, including whether all legislative provisions have been brought into force, their interpretation by courts and how legal practitioners and citizens have used them. In a broader sense, PLS looks at the effectiveness and impact of legislation, namely whether the intended objectives of the law have been met and how effectively.
Post-legislative scrutiny can be undertaken in a wide variety of ways and there is no single blueprint for it in parliamentary settings. Parliaments do things differently and practice confirms that there are many ways to conduct an effective PLS.
The analysis aims to record different practices as a way to enable parliaments around the world to get inspiration and to make informed choices on how to initiate and/or strengthen ex-post legislative impact assessments and strengthen the legislative and oversight roles of parliaments.
Methodology
This paper focuses on structures, methods, practices and approaches to operationalising PLS inquiries in a parliamentary setting.
While comparison in the strict sense is not possible, this paper identifies practices from different parliaments that conduct PLS and identifies strengths and weaknesses of these options.
Data and information is sourced through websites of parliaments and through assessment reports on the use of indicators for PLS. Data is also collected from
contributions of experts and practitioners to the Legislative Drafting Clinic and the IALS WFD Advanced Course in Post-Legislative Scrutiny.
The analysis is structured around the key dilemmas on PLS (who, when and how) and the key themes identified in WFD's 11 steps for organising PLS in parliament.
In June 2024, the Assembly of the Republic of North Macedonia adopted amendments to the Law on Organisation and Work of the State Administration Bodies (LOWSAB).
These amendments introduced significant changes in the youth sector. Specifically, the Agency for Youth and Sports was dissolved, and its responsibilities related to youth affairs were transferred to the newly restructured Ministry of Social Policy, Demography, and Youth, which become the legal successor to the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. Additionally, the legal provisions stipulated that the Ministry of Social Policy, Demography, and Youth would absorb the employees handling youth-related matters from the now-defunct Agency for Youth and Sports, along with the relevant equipment, inventory, archives, documentation, work resources, financial assets, obligations, and other resources related to youth affairs.
The legislator’s intent behind these amendments to LOWSAB was to ensure that youth affairs would no longer be managed by an independent state administration body but rather by a ministry. The decision was made that the most suitable body to handle youth affairs would be the ministry responsible for social policy. At the same time, this ministry was relieved of its responsibilities concerning labour issues and was instead assigned responsibility for demographic matters. The legislator paid attention to continuity in personnel handling youth affairs by ensuring that employees from the former Agency for Youth and Sports, specifically those engaged in youth-related matters (and not sports-related matters), would transition to the Ministry of Social Policy, Demography, and Youth.
Considering this reform, it can be interpreted that for the legislator (and for the government elected shortly after the adoption of these amendments), the youth sector become a priority. However, the adoption of these amendments is merely an initial step.
For the Ministry of Social Policy, Demography, and Youth to successfully take over the execution of youth-related responsibilities—leading to noticeable improvements in the development and implementation of youth policies and increased youth participation in decision-making—several additional steps must be taken. These include conducting a functional analysis to determine how the ministry should be reorganised to effectively execute its newly assigned responsibilities, establishing new organisational units, structuring job positions to be filled partly by former employees of the Agency for Youth and Sports, defining strategic priorities for the youth sector, and developing a long-term action plan for the relevant organisational units.
To successfully implement these steps (some of which have already begun), it is necessary to first study the relevant laws, as well as past practices and experiences of the Agency for Youth and Sports. This analysis has been prepared precisely for that purpose—to assist the Ministry in taking the necessary steps to begin its work in the youth sector.
The analysis was written by Konstantin Bitrakov, part of the "Democracy Works" project.
Тhe document is available in Macedonian and Albanian language.
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers unprecedented opportunities for democratic empowerment and societal progress. However, the manipulative use of AI can threaten democratic rights, including the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and genuine elections, whilst also presenting grave national security threats. This brief contains recommendations for democratic policymakers who seek to build resilience to the manipulative use of AI.
The challenge
AI has created a new arena of power competition. State and private actors are competing to shape this arena in favour of their political, economic and security interests. For some, the information ecosystem is not a venue for open debate but an opportunity to exert social control. Such actors pursue these interests in ways that threaten democratic processes and national security by, for example:
- conducting astroturfing operations to influence elections
- hosting assistant apps which censor factual content and store user data in autocratic jurisdictions
- generating misogynistic disinformation against female candidates
The breadth of their tactics underscores the need to engage a broad swathe of actors as part of the response.
Technological progress places further risks on the horizon, including:
- new capabilities to produce data-driven individualised disinformation at scale
- advances in text-to-image and text-to-video technologies that make it easier to produce manipulative content
- hardware improvements such as more powerful semiconductors which make AI more accessible, powerful, and affordable
- emerging advances in the stability and scale of quantum computing systems which may pose AI-enhanced risks threatening the cryptographic security of election systems
These developments underscore the need for democratic actors to share insight on emerging challenges and to face threats together.
The mitigation
Coalitions are groupings of some permanence that amplify the benefits of action. Tim Niven for the International Forum for Democratic Studies notes that “Coalitions bring together diverse skillsets to catalyse the work of prodemocracy voices; they save costs, pool resources, and avoid the duplication of efforts”.
Successful coalitions require a clear assessment of incentives. For example, it may be unrealistic to assume that actors that use AI to violate human rights will voluntarily decide to comply with global accords that contravene their economic and security interests. Building collective resilience is not synonymous with building the broadest possible coalitions.
The progressive realist approach involves three main principles to harness coalitions. These correspond to a theory of change that identifies motive (incentives), means (coalitions of purpose), and opportunity (as identified through risk-based approaches) as necessary preconditions for action.
The strategic approach
A clear-eyed understanding of incentives underscores the UK government’s overall approach to foreign policy, which it describes as ‘progressive realism’. This means recognising that states pursue their perceived self-interests, and working with that reality to pursue just ends. Progressive realism is ambitious in its aims, and realistic about the need to collaborate to achieve them.
Progressive realists regard building partnerships with like-minded allies as crucial to securing policy objectives. They are equally realistic about the extent to which actors which use AI for manipulation, or lack appropriate safeguards, can be trusted to collaborate in building a secure and democratic future for AI.
Policy recommendations
The many examples of meaningful collaboration to mitigate the manipulative use of AI often benefit from having identified or acted on incentives, mitigated risk, and acted through coalitions of purpose. Some of the brief’s recommendations to enhance these behaviours are summarised below.
Identify and act on incentives
- Disrupt AI-facilitated hostile operations at earlier stages through granular assessment of actor motivations and supply chains.
- Strengthen data protection safeguards.
- Expand sanctions registers, asset freezes and procurement blacklists.
Mitigate risk
- Bolster algorithmic transparency to limit opportunities for unchecked manipulation.
- Guarantee researcher access to platform APIs (application programming interfaces), including through meaningful enforcement of existing legislation.
- Take seriously the risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI).
- Invest in situational awareness and response capabilities globally, particularly ahead of high risk periods such as elections.
Take action through coalitions of purpose
- Empower CSOs to contribute to common information-sharing architectures such as the DISARM frameworks.
- Strengthen collaboration on commercial standards and prevent the undermining of democratic actors through autocracies’ lower standards.
- Build parliamentary resilience through peer-to-peer engagement.