The Misalignment of Technology, Democracy, and Design: A Scoping Review

Abstract

This scoping review examines the past decade of research at the intersection of democracy, technology and design. Analysing 170 articles across Scopus, the ACM Digital Library, and the DRS Digital Library, we investigate how this research relates to democracy and how democratic values are conceptualised and enacted through interactive systems. We identify four dominant orientations: technology as democratic repair, as risk, as co-constitutive of democratic practices, and as embedded in everyday collective action and lived practices. Across these, we reveal a persistent misalignment: while democratic values are frequently invoked, much of the work reduces democracy to technical or procedural problems, prioritising optimisation over power, relationality, and lived practice. As a result, key dimensions such as collective agency, structural inequalities, and infrastructural conditions remain under-addressed, offering novel opportunities for HCI research. We argue that democratic technology design should advance better alignment fostering responsibility, participation, equity, and transparency in sociotechnical systems.