Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical frames artificial intelligence as a civilizational threat to human dignity and democracy — but is that framing too deterministic? A nuanced look at AI's democratic risks and possibilities, situated within a longer transformation of informational life already reshaping political institutions.

How the NYC Council built a digital infrastructure to manage its legislative workflow — from an AI-powered duplicate checker that resolves sponsorship disputes, to a RAG system preserving institutional memory, to automated compliance tracking — and what it means for legislative modernization more broadly.

One year on, the UK House of Commons Modernization Committee has advanced coordination and institutional reform — but largely sidesteps AI and digital transformation. The gap highlights growing tension between modernization efforts and rapidly evolving technologies reshaping legislative workflows, decision-making, and institutional capacity worldwide.

At the IPU Assembly, Rodrigo Goñi Reyes, Speaker of Uruguay’s Chamber of Deputies, outlines Uruguay’s AI strategy, emphasizing regulation as an “enabling condition” for adoption. The approach highlights sequencing, institutional trust, and global coordination, offering a model for balancing innovation, risk management, and parliamentary modernization in the AI era.

At the Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly, parliamentary leaders examined how legislatures are moving from isolated AI use cases to coordinated institutional strategies. Insights from Germany and the UK highlight challenges in governance, capacity-building, and aligning AI adoption with long-term transformation and legislative effectiveness.

Insights from the Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly reveal how parliaments approach remote staff work, from advanced frameworks in the UK and Canada to infrastructure constraints in developing legislatures. The debate highlights trade-offs in flexibility, cybersecurity, productivity, and institutional resilience across uneven global starting points.

New research on UK MPs’ offices reveals how capacity constraints, fragmented systems, and rising expectations strain day-to-day representation. The findings highlight a growing “pacing problem,” where institutional support lags behind technological and civic demands.

As large language models enter legislative workflows, a critical question emerges: who shapes the first interpretation of policy issues? AI may either centralize agenda-setting power or expand committees’ in-house analytical capacity, reshaping deliberation, transparency, and the balance between lawmakers and external influence.

An informal cross-party network of Members of the European Parliament is experimenting with new ways to make parliamentary debate more interactive. Through small procedural pilots, these MEPs are testing how institutional culture can evolve.

How can parliaments think beyond short electoral cycles? This post examines policy foresight efforts such as the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System, Finland’s Committee for the Future, and Estonia’s Foresight Centre, showing how scenario planning and AI-supported analysis help legislatures prepare for long-term change.

Brazil’s Senate is advancing digital democracy with a new AI tool that links citizen ideas directly to bill drafting. Public suggestions can now inform legislation even without meeting endorsement thresholds, and the system has already contributed to a bill on protections for children of domestic violence victims.