CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Lakatos, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Title | European RenAIssance: A Digital Reform of EU Democracy |
| Summary | The European Union is facing its most serious crisis of legitimacy in history. Although European citizens generally trust the Union's institutional frameworks, they do not feel heard, listened to, or addressed by Brussels. Meanwhile, Artificial Intelligence technologies, containing both a disruptive force and a promising potential, have proven valuable tools in opening up democratic processes, contributing to more accessible, inclusive deliberations, and summarizing underlying popular opinion. Unfortunately, the current European legislation, with its rigid risk-categorization framework, threatens with a chilling effect on innovation, a hardship for digital democracy tools, and AI innovations to reach the European markets. Through the recently adopted AI Act’s regulatory sandbox system, this Thesis advocates for a responsible, public-sector-led innovation, providing financing opportunities for private providers and regulatory learning potential to member states, in understanding the threats and benefits inherent in this mysterious technology. Through the system of “Da Vinci sandboxes”, the Union should create a common platform for sectoral experimentation, establishing a vast, European dataset, to better understand the technology, its risks and benefits, and modify future legislation accordingly. With a combination of online and offline citizen panels, European citizens can be actively involved and cooperated with, in order to debate, discuss issues of a common concern. If the European Union focuses on the “AI race” with China and the US, it will most definitely lose. However, if instead, it identifies desirable technological trajectories, common goals and a unified purpose, it could channel its investment capacity into technology that is actually revolutionary, and which can greatly transform the European Demos. |
| Supervisor | Ashraf, Cameran |
| Department | Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/lakatos_daniel.pdf |
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