Living Democracy from Australia, Taiwan to Switzerland

“Democracy must be judged not only by the institutions that formally exist, but also by the extent to which voices from diverse sections of the population can actually be heard.” — Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen reminds us that democracy works in two ways: as a set of formal institutions, and as something people experience in their daily lives. The space between these two is where democratic innovation happens — especially today, as democracies face new challenges and technology reshapes how we participate.

My research lives in that space, where technology meets the lived practices of democracy. Having lived in Australia, Taiwan, and now Switzerland, I’ve seen how each society approaches democracy differently. None of them offers a perfect model, but each illuminates a particular way of transforming individual preferences into legitimate collective decisions.

Australia — design and moderation

Australia was where I cast my first vote, and it remains one of the world’s most fascinating electoral systems. Voting is mandatory. Voters rank candidates instead of picking just one. And the Senate uses proportional representation.

This mix of methods produces a distinct democratic experiment — one that rewards compromise and moderation over extremism. It also demonstrates how institutional design can influence political behaviour without fully determining it.

That realisation stayed with me. It showed that democracy is not only about ideals or culture but also about structure — about how the rules of aggregation shape perceptions of fairness. Later, this perspective informed my research on digital participation and how algorithms might play a role in mediating collective decisions online.

Taiwan — adaptation and resilience

I grew up in Taiwan during the 2000s, as the country emerged from martial law and experimented with democratic life. I still remember watching students and citizens occupy parliament in 2014 during the Sunflower Movement, protesting opaque decision-making.

That moment changed everything. It sparked an era of digital democracy that remains unique in the world. The g0v community reimagined government transparency through open data. The Presidential Hackathon turned civic innovation into a regular state-supported practice. And through vTaiwan, citizens used the platform Pol.is to deliberate on policy — not to force consensus, but to map areas of shared understanding.

Audrey Tang once described this approach as “finding the commonality in differences.” It’s a simple phrase but captures something profound: technology can help democracy by revealing connections, not divisions.

As someone who later joined and contributed to these communities, I saw how civic tech in Taiwan became more than tools — it became a philosophy of self-governance. It taught me that technology, when built around democratic values, can enhance inclusion and resilience rather than erode them.

Switzerland — deliberation and compromise

Now I live in Wädenswil, a quiet town on Lake Zurich. Here, democracy looks different again. It’s slow, deliberate, and deeply local. Power starts in the communes, moves to the cantons, and only then reaches the federal level.

I’m always impressed by how this structure embodies a culture of compromise. The Swiss Federal Council — a seven-member executive shared among multiple parties — reflects this perfectly. Instead of winner-takes-all, decisions are negotiated until broad agreement is reached.

Working on participatory projects like Stadtidee Aarau and Kultur Komitee Winterthur, I’ve seen how Swiss democracy blends structure with conversation. Citizens deliberate, propose, and allocate public budgets, embodying the principle that democracy grows through patient collaboration.

And as a history nerd, I can’t help but think of how this culture evolved. Wädenswil’s reading societies in the 1790s collected evidence of local rights against urban control and later joined the Bockenkrieg uprising of 1804. Their fight for representation and self-governance laid the groundwork for the participatory principles Switzerland values today.

Democracy as an evolving dialogue

All of these experiences have convinced me that democracy is not a finished product. As Swiss politician Andrea Gross once said, “Democracy is an unfinished work of art.”

Each system I’ve lived in represents a different interpretation of that work. Australia refines democracy through institutional design. Taiwan experiments through technology and civic imagination. Switzerland sustains it through deliberation and decentralisation.

Together, they show that democracy is not one system but an evolving dialogue between institutions and lived practice.

The algorithmic frontier

As we move further into the digital age, democracies everywhere are meeting a new frontier — the algorithmic one. National borders fade inside digital spaces governed not by constitutional law but by computational logic.

This shift challenges how we think about participation. Algorithms now shape what information we see, how we make choices, and even how we deliberate. When we design algorithmic systems, we implicitly decide what fairness, representation, and participation mean — often without realising it.

Democracy, in a sense, has always been algorithmic: it gathers and processes preferences to make collective decisions. The difference now is that these processes are moving into technical systems we barely understand, let alone govern.

Co‑developing technology and democracy

Perhaps democratic resilience in the digital age depends not on resisting technology or embracing it blindly, but on co-developing it with care. We need both public understanding of how technological systems work and technological designs that embody democratic values.

This means moving beyond simple “humans versus machines” debates. It means exploring how human and algorithmic intelligence might work together — how algorithms might help, rather than hinder, collective self-governance.

Democracy has always been both a technical system and a lived experience. The challenge of our generation is not only to protect it from technological change but to let it evolve through it. The question is not if algorithms will participate in our democratic processes, but how we design that participation to strengthen, rather than weaken, our shared capacity for self-rule.