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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_qWawXRsLY&t=1013s
Public participation is crucial for AI governance, and central to the democratic process of policymaking. However, previous studies on public participation in AI policy suggest that mainstream policy solutions for AI regulation remain expert dominated, and that the public understanding of AI remains relatively nascent (Schiff, 2023). To promote greater awareness among citizens on AI, numerous large-scale literacy initiatives are being proposed and implemented by different countries (e.g., Finland’s Elements of AI, the US Presidential Executive Order on “Advancing Artificial Intelligence for American Youth”, 2025), big tech companies (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Salesforce), and universities. These literacy initiatives aim to improve the AI knowledge and awareness among the general public and targeted groups such as workers and students, enabling them to engage with and use AI. While this is an implicit—and often explicit—goal of AI literacy initiatives, we have not yet studied whether, and how, these initiatives actually affect citizen political participation. Deriving from Long and Magerko's (2020) seventeen competencies of AI literacy, we identify two forms of AI literacy focused on technical (design and development of AI) and evaluative (social and ethical implications of AI) competencies. Through an online survey of 2,000 participants recruited on Prolific, the study randomly assigns participants to specific competencies administered through training videos across three treatment groups—technical, evaluative, and a third group comprising both technical and evaluative competencies, and two control groups—pure and neutral control. We examine the effects of these AI literacy competencies on two types of political participation outcomes—macro-political participation (electoral, civic and administrative participation (Yang, 2012)) and micro-political behavior (everyday digital political behavior) in AI policy, mediated through AI self-efficacy, trust in AI, and perceived egotropic and sociotropic relevance. Drawing on the political participation and sustainability literature (De Moor, 2017), we articulate and measure micro-political behavior as an alternative mode of political participation that complements the traditional macro-political participation. Understanding micro-political behavior is important as it captures forms of civic engagement that might be more accessible and immediate for citizens, especially in the current globalized and digital age, where AI is increasingly shaping our everyday lives. The study provides insights on whether growing AI literacy efforts are truly positioned to positively impact citizen engagement or are more oriented toward technical workforce education. It also helps understand whether literacy initiatives—typically focused on technical knowledge—are sufficient to positively impact citizen engagement, or whether extant limitations of internal and external political self-efficacy preclude such impacts.
References
De Moor, J. (2017). Lifestyle politics and the concept of political participation. Acta Politica, 52(2), 179-197.
Long, D., & Magerko, B. (2020). What is AI Literacy? Competencies and Design Considerations. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376727
Schiff, D. S. (2023). Looking through a policy window with tinted glasses: Setting the agenda for U.S. AI policy. Review of Policy Research, 40(5), 729–756. https://doi.org/10.1111/ropr.12535
Yang, K. (2012). Theory Building and Testing in Citizen Participation Research: Reflection and Conjecture. In The State of Citizen Participation in America, edited by H. L. Schachter and K. Yang, 447–464. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.