1. Home ›
  2. Research ›
  3. Research Innovation Collaboratives ›
  4. Modeling Democracy with AI

Modeling Democracy with AI

Research Innovation Cohort: 2025-2026

Why do democracies develop or decline? What mechanisms and systemic interactions foster democratic development or catalyze backsliding?

Person wearing glasses intently examines a computer screen displaying glowing blue vertical lines of code with small red accents.

We reconceptualize democracy not as a monolithic outcome but as an emergent property of a dynamic and complex system composed of interrelated variables and constructs that can be distant, intermediate and proximate causes and consequences of democracy. Those components (geography, history, and demographics, well-being and sustainability, social institutions, etc.) usually are studied in isolation from one another; however, they are strongly associated and can cause democratic development or decline, which in turn can cause changes of them. In addition, each of these components are complex phenomena as well which are hard to measure.

To that end, we introduce an AI-powered modeling and forecasting system - AI-based Modeling of Democratic Development and Decline (AIM-3D) - that harnesses two novel machine learning techniques: Neural Additive Vector Autoregression (NAVAR) for causal structure discovery and Network Vector Autoregression with Time-Varying Nodal Influence (tvNAR) for dynamic, high-dimensional data analysis. These tools allow us to model temporal, nonlinear, and reciprocal relationships between democracy-related variables and constructs with both precision and interpretability. We complement this technical approach with theoretically grounded data reduction via Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and unsupervised learning for dimensionality reduction.

  1. Michael Coppedge

    Professor, Department of Political Science
    Faculty Fellow, Kellogg Institute for International Studies

  2. John Behrens

    Professor of the Practice and Director, Technology and Digital Studies Program
    Director, College of Arts & Letters Office of Digital Strategy
    Concurrent Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering

  3. Dmitry Zaytsev

    Associate Professor of the Practice, Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society
    Faculty Fellow, Kellogg Institute for International Studies

  4. Valentina Kuskova

    Professor of the Practice and Associate Director, Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society

  5. Peitong Jing

    Candidate in Political Science and University Presidential Fellow, University of Notre Dame
    Doctoral Student Affiliate, Kellogg Institute for International Studies

Partners