The Higher Research Seminar: Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça, Federal University of Minas Girais - “Algorithms and Democracy”

OUP’s book abstract:

Algorithmic Institutionalism uniquely conceives of algorithms as institutions in contemporary societies, focusing on different dimensions of how algorithms structure decision-making and enact power relations. This work addresses the need for new analytical lenses to make sense of algorithms’ rising ubiquity in decision-making and to foster democratically infused interactions between humans and algorithms. The book contains three sections. 

1. The first section (Chapters 1 and 2) explains the underlying concepts of algorithms as institutions. It uses the analytical lens of institutional theories as a framework for studying algorithms to comprehend their social implications properly. 
2. The second section (Chapters 3 to 5) applies the framework of Algorithmic Institutionalism to make sense of algorithms’ deployment in security, governments’ platformization, and recommendation systems. 
3. The third section (Chapter 6) addresses the challenge of developing approaches to democratize the new political order, even as that order experiences the churn of influence from algorithmic decision-making’s global expansion. This section points to key democratic values that are relevant for contemporary societies constructing legitimate decisions.

Book link: https://academic.oup.com/book/55255

About Ricardo: 

Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça is the Chair of the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. He coordinates Margem – Research Group on Democracy and Justice and is a fellow at INCT - Digital Democracy. He is also an Adjunct Professor and a long-term collaborator of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy (University of Canberra, Australia). His interests include Democratic Theory, Contentious Politics, and Political Communication. He is one of the authors of Algorithmic Institutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2023) and one of the editors of Crises of Democracy and the Public Sphere (Editora UFMG, 2023) and of Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022), among other books and several journal publications.

The Higher Research Seminar is the main collective seminar of the Department. The research staff and invited national and international leading scholars present ongoing research and analyses of a broad range of exciting topics of relevance for Political Science.

The Higher Research Seminar is held on Wednesdays 13.15 to 14.30 in Eden 367, unless otherwise indicated. PhD Mid-term seminars 13:15 to 14:45. 

Convenors: Robert Klemmensen and Jonathan Polk

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The Higher Research Seminar | Department of Political Science