The Inward-Facing Parliament

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Written By Beatriz Rey

Most parliamentary AI helps staff serve staff and Members serve Members – Brazil and Chile may be exceptions that show what else it could do

BY BEATRIZ REY

Parliaments can run AI-powered chatbots for entirely different purposes. One might use the technology to help staffers understand procedural rules. Another might rely on it to help citizens understand the content of bills.

I recently read an academic paper by Francesco Bromo, Paolo Gambacciani, and Luca Pinto that proposes a dual-layer model to help us understand this. The authors distinguish between two things: what an AI tool technically does, and who it connects. A transcription system, chatbot, or summarization tool may look similar technically, but its institutional role changes depending on who provides the information and who receives the output.

Is it helping staff process documents? Helping MPs legislate or scrutinize the government? Bringing citizen input into parliament? Or making parliamentary information more accessible to the public? That distinction allows the authors to separate uses aimed mainly at efficiency from those aimed at transparency, participation, and representation.

The article’s main finding is that parliamentary AI is still being used much more to make institutions run faster than to make representation work differently. Of the 72 AI tools mapped in the study, only five move information between different types of actors. The authors call the rest “self-serving,” a technical label rather than a criticism: staff use tools whose outputs go back to staff, and MPs use tools whose outputs go back to MPs. I’ll call these tools inward-facing, since they keep information circulating within the same group rather than connecting parliament’s different actors.

Across the tools examined, the most common uses are activities like transcription, translation, document classification, search, and user support. AI is helping staff process information, organize documents, retrieve material, and manage internal workflows. Tools for legislative drafting or public engagement are much less common.

The authors note two exceptions to this pattern, both in Latin America. The first is Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, which hosts a tool that collects citizen comments on bills, processes them, and provides legislators a summary of the arguments for and against. Chile’s Chamber of Deputies supports nine tools that help members draft proposals, build arguments, answer procedural questions, and track expenses. The authors call this a possible “do-it-yourself parliament,” one in which AI reduces Members’ reliance on specialized staff by giving legislators more direct access to information and support.

I appreciated that the authors do not assume citizen-facing AI is automatically democratic. Bringing public input into parliament raises a harder set of questions: how that input is filtered, how preferences are aggregated, how content is moderated, how bias is managed, who may be left out by the digital divide, and if public input has any effect at all on policy passage or development.

Those problems are much more difficult to solve than administrative efficiency. And that helps explain why parliamentary administrations may often see a quicker, more visible return from tools that reduce workloads or speed up internal processes than from tools designed to deepen participation.

Other News

  • The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has launched Codify, an open-source tool designed to help governments turn statute books into structured, machine-readable legislation across languages and open standards. The goal is to make legal data easier to use for officials, lawyers, citizens, and legal-tech developers, with several countries already exploring or implementing the tool.

  • The Pacific Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (PIPA) held its first General Assembly in Tahiti, shifting from institution-building to defining a distinct parliamentary role in Pacific regional affairs. The Assembly also welcomed Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Tuvalu as new members, Bougainville as an observer, and adopted the Vaiete Declaration, its first common political orientation.

  • Portugal’s Assembly of the Republic has an unusual resident: Tobias, a cat who lives inside Parliament. A playful online game invites users to explore the building virtually and try to find him, turning a parliamentary curiosity into a light-touch way of engaging people with the institution.

  • Samuel Hooper encourages US state legislatures to publicly share their internal bill-drafting manuals. He argues that publishing these manuals would give both human and AI drafters access not only to drafting conventions, but also to the reasoning behind them, which cannot reliably be inferred from enacted bills alone.

POPVOX Foundation News

  • POPVOX Foundation, in collaboration with the House Democracy Partnership, convened parliamentary staff from Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Moldova in Tirana from July 20 to 23, with the Albanian Parliament as host, for a workshop on AI and parliamentary modernization. Teams assessed their own data, built working tools including a scheduling system, a legal research dashboard, and an MP-support dashboard, and saw the Albanian Parliament present the voice-to-text transcription tool it developed alongside its Hansard secretaries. Each team left with a modernization roadmap that POPVOX Foundation tailored to its self-assessed needs and translated into its own language.

  • POPVOX Foundation also launched DPP Africa in Accra from August 4 to 6, where the Parliament of Ghana hosted staff from Ghana, Botswana, The Gambia, Senegal, South Africa, and the Pan-African Parliament, alongside leaders from PNAfrica and AFRIPAL. Following the launch ceremony, delegations worked through an applied workshop, hosted in collaboration with the House Democracy Partnership, on AI. POPVOX Foundation plans to present a progress report on the cohort’s work at the second AFRIPAL Conference in Gaborone, Botswana, in July 2027.

  • In September 2024, Caribbean parliamentarians gathered in Miami and asked what one project could benefit every parliament in the region, a question that led POPVOX Foundation to launch the Digital Parliaments Project with five founding Caribbean parliaments in early 2025. Two years later, POPVOX Foundation, in collaboration with the House Democracy Partnership and ParlAmericas, brought staff from 17 Caribbean parliaments back to Miami on September 12 and 13 at Florida International University to work through what AI adoption requires inside a parliament. Over the weekend, delegations built working prototypes (a bill tracker, a document registry, an attendance register, and a demo video making the case for modernization), drafted a sample internal AI-use policy, and produced practical guidance on AI training, change management, and transparency that each parliament can adapt. Each team left with a modernization roadmap that POPVOX Foundation tailored to its self-assessed needs.

Events

Call for papers on legislative politics and AI

Modern Parliament (“ModParl”) is a newsletter from POPVOX Foundation that provides insights into the evolution of legislative institutions worldwide. Learn more and subscribe at modparl.substack.com.

Beatriz Rey
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Reclaiming the First Branch: Eight House Rules Changes for the 120th Congress