---
title: "Taiwan's digital democracy experiment: what it shows, what it doesn't"
date: 2026-05-25
summary: "vTaiwan is the most-cited example of digital deliberation working at government scale. Run through the criteria DOD was asking about in 2017 and the picture gets more interesting — and more instructive."
authors:
  - Brian Khuu
  - Claude
ai_assist: drafted
categories:
  - civic tech
  - deliberative democracy
location:
  latitude: 25.0330
  longitude: 121.5654
  name: Taipei, Taiwan
---

Taiwan is frequently cited as a place where digital deliberation actually worked at government scale. That claim deserves scrutiny — and the scrutiny is more interesting than the headline. The factual background is in the [vTaiwan](../../organisations/vtaiwan.md) and [g0v](../../organisations/g0v.md) entries in the DOD Democracy Landscape.

<!-- more -->

## The criteria DOD was asking about in 2017

When DOD first discussed Pol.is in [August 2017](../2017-08-25.md), the group ran through a set of evaluation criteria for democratic technologies: *who decides what the questions are? does it accrue decisions, or do we have to keep re-deciding the same things? will it tend to crush minorities? will it be vulnerable to corruption? what's the human bandwidth cost?*

vTaiwan — the Taiwanese consultation platform built around Pol.is — gives concrete answers to all of these. Some are better than you'd expect. Some explain exactly why the platform stalled.

## What Pol.is actually does to deliberation

[Nicholas Gruen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Gruen), who presented to DOD on isegoria and citizens' juries in [2017](../2017-08-21-podcast.md) and [2020](../2020-03-20.md), has a frame that maps cleanly onto this. Elections are *competitive* and *aristocratic* — you win by beating opponents, and the people who rise are a self-selected political class. Juries are *unitary* and *democratic in the Greek sense* — your job is to reach a conclusion together, and equality of speech (*isegoria*) is the design principle, not freedom to out-shout.

Pol.is is, at its core, an isegoria machine. Instead of threaded argument (which rewards combative voices), participants vote agree/disagree/pass on each other's statements. The algorithm surfaces cross-cluster consensus — points of agreement between groups that disagree on most things. Minority views that cut across conventional divides become visible rather than drowned out. The 2015 Uber consultation showed this clearly: taxi drivers and Uber supporters converged on shared positions about registration and fair regulation that open debate had buried under noise.[^uber-consensus]

On the 2017 criteria: Pol.is scores well on *crushing minorities* (the design surfaces minority cross-cluster views rather than flattening them) and *human bandwidth* (agree/disagree/pass is genuinely low-friction at scale). *Vulnerability to corruption* was handled through radical transparency — all meetings live-streamed, all outputs published verbatim.

## The structural answers — where it falls short

**Who decides the questions?** The government. vTaiwan's scope was determined by which ministries were willing to engage, and in practice it stayed mostly confined to digital-policy questions — ride-sharing, fintech, online alcohol sales. The civic community couldn't put whatever it wanted on the agenda. This turned out to matter when the government's appetite shrank.

**Does it accrue decisions?** No. vTaiwan's recommendations were never legally binding. In its early phase — roughly 2015–2018 — around 80% of its ~26 deliberations led to some government action, by its own count. But that track record ran almost entirely on political novelty and on [Audrey Tang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang), then the platform's champion inside government. The platform hasn't driven a major decision since 2018. One policymaker described it as "a tiger without teeth."[^tiger-no-teeth] vTaiwan co-creator and former legislator Jason Hsu made the same point in his own words: because the government isn't required to act on recommendations, "legislators don't take it seriously."[^hsu-quote]

Gruen's line from his [2017 DOD presentation](../2017-08-21-podcast.md) fits exactly: *"in political combat, the considered opinion of the people amounts to nothing unless you consider it properly."* vTaiwan could surface a considered public view. It was never wired to compel anyone to act on it.

## Institutionalisation as partial victory — and partial defeat

When the state built its own version — **Join** (join.gov.tw), run by the Digital Affairs Ministry — it had what vTaiwan structurally lacked: government legitimacy. Join reached older, less tech-savvy citizens and ranged well beyond digital policy into drunk-driving law, sexual assault legislation, child abuse policy. In effect, vTaiwan proved the model and the state absorbed it. COVID severed the in-person deliberation the four-stage process depended on, and participation fell.

Not everyone reads this as failure. Beth Noveck (GovLab) argues that enabling 200,000 people to shape 26 pieces of legislation is a genuine achievement, and that a process genuinely threatening to traditional political power will face institutional resistance — which is itself an explanation for why official support stayed thin. She places vTaiwan alongside Madrid's Decide platform, which drew nearly half a million sign-ups but turned just one of 28,000 citizen proposals into policy ([Noveck, 2023](https://bethnoveck.medium.com/was-vtaiwan-such-a-big-flop-after-all-d6b365f916dc)).

The tradeoff is real either way. The government version traded g0v's civic energy and independence for legitimacy and reach. Whether that's a net gain depends on what you think deliberation is for.

## vTaiwan and the isegoria gap

Terrence Chen's 2024 study of Taiwan's digital-government initiatives provides the sharpest framing. He distinguishes *strong* democracy — citizens as co-governing partners in actual decisions — from *thin* democracy, where citizens are *monitorial* (watchful but not deciding) or treated as *entrepreneurs and consumers*. His verdict: even Taiwan's admired platforms mostly delivered the thin version, because binding decision-making power never left officials' hands ([Chen, 2024](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517241296038)).

This maps directly onto [what DOD was asking in 2017](../2017-08-25.md), and onto Gruen's isegoria frame. vTaiwan created isegoria in the input phase — equality of speech, consensus surfaced, minority views made visible. Then it handed the output back to a system running on the opposite logic: competitive, aristocratic, emotionally amplified. The isegoria evaporated at the threshold between deliberation and decision.

That gap — between surfacing a public will and enacting it — is the design problem vTaiwan solved halfway. Closing the second half requires a binding mandate, which is a political question as much as a design one. No civic-tech tool substitutes for it.

vTaiwan continues as a volunteer laboratory, experimenting with AI-assisted deliberation and informing Taiwan's AI governance processes. The method got institutionalised. The gap it couldn't close remains open — and is the same gap that citizens' juries, participatory budgeting, and every other deliberative process has to reckon with sooner or later.

---

<details>
<summary>About this analysis</summary>

The isegoria frame used here isn't imported from the vTaiwan literature — it came from reading DOD's own 2017 meeting transcript, where Gruen's quote ("in political combat, the considered opinion of the people amounts to nothing unless you consider it properly") appeared verbatim in the notes. That grounded the analysis in DOD's own intellectual history rather than treating vTaiwan as an external case study.

One claim worth scrutinising: the "80% action rate" on 26 deliberations (2015–2018) comes from vTaiwan's own tally, not independent verification. It's frequently cited but self-reported.

What this post doesn't cover: the AI governance angle (Alignment Assemblies, the AI Basic Act consultation) is real and fast-moving; the vTaiwan org page has the current details. The post also doesn't engage with the Taiwanese constitutional context or how the Sunflower Movement shaped what was politically possible — relevant background if you want to assess transferability.

</details>

---

[^uber-consensus]: "However, as vTaiwan users revised viewpoints, they coalesced around more consensual statements like ‘the government should set up a fair regulatory regime,’ and ‘private passenger vehicles should be registered.’" Sebastian Cushing Rodriguez, ["Consensus Building in Taiwan, the Poster Child of Digital Democracy"](https://democracy-technologies.org/participation/consensus-building-in-taiwan/), *Democracy Technologies*, 2023.

[^tiger-no-teeth]: "vTaiwan has been criticised for being, as one policymaker described it," a tiger without teeth. Sebastian Cushing Rodriguez, ["Consensus Building in Taiwan, the Poster Child of Digital Democracy"](https://democracy-technologies.org/participation/consensus-building-in-taiwan/), *Democracy Technologies*, 2023.

[^hsu-quote]: "legislators don't take it seriously." Since the government is not mandated to adopt recommendations coming from vTaiwan, vTaiwan co-creator and former Taiwanese legislator Jason Hsu told The Daily Beast, quoted in ["Taiwan Tried to Digitize Democracy. It Was a Huge Flop."](https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/taiwan-tried-digitize-democracy-huge-084810185.html), Yahoo Finance (republishing the original, paywalled *Daily Beast* report).

## Sources & further reading

- Sebastian Cushing Rodriguez, ["Consensus Building in Taiwan, the Poster Child of Digital Democracy"](https://democracy-technologies.org/participation/consensus-building-in-taiwan/), *Democracy Technologies*, 2023.
- Beth Simone Noveck, ["Was vTaiwan such a big flop, after all?"](https://bethnoveck.medium.com/was-vtaiwan-such-a-big-flop-after-all-d6b365f916dc), *Reboot Democracy / Medium*, 2023 — a rebuttal to the original *Daily Beast* report (paywalled), whose key quotes it reproduces.
- Terrence Ting-Yen Chen, ["Strong or thin digital democracy? The democratic implications of Taiwan's open government data policy in the 2010s"](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517241296038), *Big Data & Society*, 2024 (academic article; may be paywalled).
- People Powered, ["Digital Participation Case Study: Taiwan"](https://www.peoplepowered.org/news-content/digital-participation-case-study-taiwan) — on vTaiwan's current volunteer-driven, AI-assisted phase.
- Chris Horton, ["The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws"](https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simple-but-ingenious-system-taiwan-uses-to-crowdsource-its-laws/), *MIT Technology Review*, 2018 — the early, optimistic account.
- [DOD August 2017 meetup](../2017-08-25.md) — Pol.is first discussed alongside other technologies changing democracy, with criteria for evaluating democratic tech.
- [Nicholas Gruen at DOD, August 2017](../2017-08-21-podcast.md) — presentation on isegoria, elections as aristocratic, and citizens' juries as the democratic alternative.
- [Nicholas Gruen at DOD, March 2020](../2020-03-20.md) — podcast on isegoria and the case for citizens' juries in Australia.
