"One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over-and upending-nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship-all transformed by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory explores a particularly unsettling and rapidly evolving facet of our new digital lives: transformations that affect our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments. To understand these transformations, scholars from multiple disciplines (computer science, philosophy, political science, economics, history, and media and communications/journalism) wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. The contributors consider what democratic theory-broadly defined as normative theorizing about the values and institutional design of democracy-can bring to the practice of digital technologies. From the connectivity and transmission of information that has inspired positive change through movements such as the Arab Spring and #MeToo to the nefarious spread of distrust and outright disruption in democratic processes, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing not just individual states, but democracy as a philosophy and institution"--

Lucy Bernholz is senior research scholar at Stanford University's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and director of the Digital Civil Society Lab. She is the author of Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets: The Deliberate Evolution and coeditor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values. Hélène Landemore is tenured associate professor of political science at Yale University. She is the author of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many and Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century. She is also the co-editor of Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms. Rob Reich is professor of political science at Stanford University, where he also serves as director of the Center for Ethics in Society and codirector of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He is the author most recently of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better and coeditor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values, and Education, Justice, and Democracy.