Polity Atlas
05 · Future Observatory

Watching society transform

Research, technology shifts, AI governance, post-labour economics and digital statehood — each item tagged with its status and the claims it changes.

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Research

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2026-10-24ResearchContesting automated decisions: explanation, human review and appealHow the GDPR, the CJEU's SCHUFA and Dun & Bradstreet Austria judgments, the EU AI Act, the Council of Europe AI convention, the UK's 2025 reforms and US rules give people a way to challenge automated decisions — and what evidence shows works in practice.Established2026-10-20ResearchAutomated welfare enforcement compared: seven documented systemsA comparative study of SyRI, the Dutch childcare-benefit risk model, Michigan's MiDAS, Australia's Robodebt, Denmark's fraud-control models, the UK DWP advances model and Serbia's Social Card: what failed, who noticed, and which safeguards the evidence supports.Established2026-10-06ResearchDo people accept algorithmic decisions in government? What surveys and experiments showPeople often trust algorithmic advice but reject algorithms as sole decision-makers, especially for welfare and justice. Appeals to a human, meaningful human involvement, explanations of individual decisions and trust in the deploying agency raise acceptance; UK concern about welfare-eligibility AI rose from 44% to 59% between 2022 and 2024.Established2026-08-25ResearchAI as a deliberation aid: evidence from Polis to the Habermas MachineOpinion mapping, automated moderation and AI-drafted group statements have helped people find common ground in Taiwan, in Stanford deliberations and in DeepMind's 2024 Science experiments. The same tools shift opinions and narrow the range of ideas, so who controls and audits them matters more than whether they work.Established2026-07-07ResearchDigital identity systems compared: Estonia, India, Kenya, the EU and SwitzerlandA comparison of five national digital identity systems on inclusion, exclusion, security and oversight. Systems built before their legal framework (Aadhaar, Huduma Namba) were reshaped by courts; those legislated or voted on first (eIDAS 2.0, the Swiss e-ID) are voluntary and data-minimising but still unproven at scale.Established2026-05-19ResearchDAO governance in practice: what the on-chain evidence showsA review of empirical studies of DAO voting finds low participation, extreme concentration of voting power, delegation that mostly serves large holders, and governance that can be bought, as in the 2022 Beanstalk attack. Legal wrappers and bicameral designs such as Optimism's address some problems but remain largely unevaluated.Established2026-03-10ResearchLessons from the Dutch childcare-benefits scandalA parliamentary inquiry found 'unprecedented injustice' in how tax authorities treated families suspected of fraud; the cabinet resigned in January 2021.Established2023-07-07ResearchRobodebt: what a Royal Commission found about automated debt-raisingAustralia's Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme reported in July 2023 on a welfare-debt programme that relied on averaging annual income data.Established