Significance How do democracies make decisions? We can read transcripts from parliament houses and legislative halls to see how particular ideas are introduced and debated, but we understand very little about the general principles of how these systems deal with information, or the origins of those principles. Here we study the parliamentary assembly of the first 2 years of the French Revolution, a model for democracies and revolutions across the globe, and show how patterns of speaking are created, picked up, and ignored or propagated. Political ideology, top–down rules, and individual charisma all affect how word patterns survive and thrive or, conversely, disappear and drop away. , The French Revolution brought principles of “liberty, equality, fraternity” to bear on the day-to-day challenges of governing what was then the largest country in Europe. Its experiments provided a model for future revolutions and democracies across the globe, but this first modern revolution had no model to follow. Using reconstructed transcripts of debates held in the Revolution’s first parliament, we present a quantitative analysis of how this body managed innovation. We use information theory to track the creation, transmission, and destruction of word-use patterns across over 40,000 speeches and a thousand speakers. The parliament as a whole was biased toward the adoption of new patterns, but speakers’ individual qualities could break these overall trends. Speakers on the left innovated at higher rates, while speakers on the right acted to preserve prior patterns. Key players such as Robespierre (on the left) and Abbé Maury (on the right) played information-processing roles emblematic of their politics. Newly created organizational functions—such as the Assembly president and committee chairs—had significant effects on debate outcomes, and a distinct transition appears midway through the parliament when committees, external to the debate process, gained new powers to “propose and dispose.” Taken together, these quantitative results align with existing qualitative interpretations, but also reveal crucial information-processing dynamics that have hitherto been overlooked. Great orators had the public’s attention, but deputies (mostly on the political left) who mastered the committee system gained new powers to shape revolutionary legislation.
The French Protests and French History
Whenever France erupts in protests, the question arises: how does French history help explain what is going on?
annotations: Politique et technologie
traduction française du billet de blog "Politics and technology" de Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson
annotations: Démocratie versus inégalités
traduction française du billet de blog "Democracy vs. inequality" de Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson
Opinionrot: Toward a Theory of Collective Reasoning Decay in the Age of Synthetic Consensus
This article introduces the concept of opinionrot to describe the structural erosion of collective reasoning within contemporary information systems. Rather than treating post-truth politics as a failure of individual rationality or as a decline in information quality alone, the article argues that public reasoning is increasingly shaped by infrastructures that capture attention, monetize cognitive bias, and automate the conditions under which claims become visible and credible. Methodologically, the article proceeds through a conceptual-historical reconstruction, tracing how persuasion became institutionalized, platformized, and increasingly predictive. It identifies three mechanisms through which opinionrot intensifies today: cognitive capture, infrastructural decay, and discursive saturation. The framework is illustrated through debates over equality and affirmative action, showing how communicative infrastructures can transform contested political concepts into predictable and polarized semantic routines. By shifting the analysis from discrete falsehoods to the conditions under which public judgment is formed, contested, and revised, the article offers a diagnostic vocabulary for studying how information infrastructures increasingly convert deliberation into statistical efficiency within contemporary economies of attention.
Baromètre de la confiance politique CEVIPOF 2025 : le grand désarroi démocratique
Rejet, méfiance, découragement : l'enquête annuelle de référence du CEVIPOF dresse un constat alarmant sur la perception de la politique en France.
Verification, Deliberation, Accountability: A new framework for tackling epistemic collapse and renewing democracy
Demos is Britain’s leading cross-party think-tank. We produce original research, publish innovative thinkers and host thought-provoking events.
For all talk about how tech fascists want to "destroy democracy", people don't have a concrete idea of what comes after, i.e. "neo-feudalism" "monarchy" "patchworks", "fiefdoms", etc Very simple:
For all talk about how tech fascists want to "destroy democracy", people don't have a concrete idea of what comes after, i.e. "neo-feudalism" "monarchy" "patchworks", "fiefdoms", etc Very simple:— shanley (@shanley) August 5, 2026
A Model of Protests, Revolution, and Information
A collective action or revolt succeeds only if sufficiently many people participate. We study how potential revolutionaries’ ability to coordinate is affected by what they learn from different sources. We first examine how people learn about the likelihood of a revolution’s success by talking to those around themselves, which can either work in favor or against the success of an uprising, depending on the prior beliefs of the agents, the homogeneity of preferences in the population, and the number of contacts. We extend the analysis by examining the effects of homophily on learning: people are more likely to meet others who have similar preferences, undercutting learning. We introduce variants of our model to discuss other ways of learning about the support for a revolution. We discuss why holding mass protests before a revolt provides more informative signals of people’s willingness to actively participate than other less costly forms of communication (e.g., via social media). We also show how outcomes of revolutions in one region can inform citizens of another region and thus trigger (or discourage) neighboring revolutions. We also discuss the role of governments in avoiding revolutions and learning about their citizens’ concerns; in particular, by observing the strength of protests and counter-protests.
Corruption : la police décrypte le manuel du pot-de-vin des grandes entreprises françaises
Comme tout phénomène criminel, la délinquance en col blanc s’adapte à son époque et aux évolutions législatives. Un rapport policier, obtenu par Mediapart, analyse les méthodes corruptrices utilisées…
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
How a permanent Citizens' Assembly in Paris passed a bill into law
A French civil servant who facilitated the historic process explains what happened, from start to finish
The Ancient Invention That Solves Corruption
Les motifs de la confiance (et de la défiance ) politique : intérêt, connaissance et conviction dans les formes du raisonnement politique
Le rapport de confiance ou de défiance unissant les citoyens à la politique se nourrit d’une variété de facteurs relatifs à la position sociale des citoyens, à la mise en cause de leurs intérêts par les politiques publiques comme à leur perception normative de l’univers politiques. En se fondant sur un matériel qualitatif composé de groupes de discussion réunissant des citoyens français faiblement politisés, cette contribution vise à cerner les motifs argumentatifs de la confiance et de la défiance politique. Leurs propos expriment un rapport au politique construit de façon endogène, à dimension fortement normative et manifestant une capacité argumentative fondée sur différents types de principes.
Fractured reality
The report examines the evolving impact of digital technologies on European democracy. In an era of a global struggle to control the information space, this report offers critical insights into the fracturing of perceived realities, the rise of the ‘fantasy-industrial complex’, and the systemic risks posed by the attention economy. It exposes how platforms algorithmically prioritise engagement over accuracy, reinforcing ideological echo chambers and amplifying mis- and disinformation that erode democratic resilience. The report highlights how structural incentives and foreign control of the most important players in the information space undermine information integrity, collective knowledge and civic discourse. In response, the report presents a number of recommendations from fostering alternative public spaces and crowd-sourced knowledge systems to reforming business models, restoring user agency, and advancing EU digital sovereignty through decentralised infrastructure
