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AI integration in lawmaking requires a parliamentary change process, not just a tech project

By Franklin De Vrieze.

Across democratic governance systems, parliaments are facing a paradox. Never before have there been so many technological tools promising to improve legislative scrutiny, evidence use, and public engagement. Yet never has the gap between the pace of technological change and the capacity of democratic institutions to respond felt so wide. This is not simply a story about adopting new software or experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI); it is about institutional transformation. The application of technology and AI in legislative scrutiny requires a fundamental change process in parliaments: one that reshapes data practices, organisational culture, and even how we conceptualise lawmaking itself.

The pacing problem: when governance moves slower than technology

The “pacing problem” captures the growing mismatch between rapid technological innovation and slower institutional adaptation and governance.

Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and POPVOX Foundation distinguish three interlocking layers of this challenge with regards to parliaments. First, the external pacing problem: parliaments struggle to keep up with technologies already embedded in society. Secondly, the intra-government pacing problem: executives are often early adopters of AI for service delivery, policy design, or enforcement, while legislatures lag behind in their ability to scrutinise these tools effectively, reinforming existing patterns of executive dominance. Thirdly, the internal pacing problem: parliamentary ICT systems, data structures, and workflows frequently remain fragmented, paper-based, or incompatible with modern analytical tools.

The risks of inaction are not abstract. According to the IPU World e-Parliament Report 2024, over 70% of parliaments globally now publish legislative information online, but fewer than half report having interoperable legislative data systems capable of supporting advanced analysis. As AI adoption accelerates in the executive and private sectors, these internal weaknesses can translate into real power asymmetries, further weakening legislative oversight and checks and balances.

How parliaments are already using AI

Despite these challenges, parliaments are not starting from zero. A growing number are experimenting with AI across administrative, legislative, and participatory functions.

On the administrative side, AI is increasingly used to automate transcription, translation, document classification, and summarisation. The European Parliament, for example, deploys eTranslation, speech-to-text systems, and automated indexing to manage multilingual debates and documents at scale. Similar AI functions are noted in the Canadian House of Commons.

Legislatively, AI tools are being applied to amendment analysis, legal consistency checks, and information retrieval. Italy’s Parliament has piloted AI-supported compliance checking of amendments against constitutional and legal constraints. The National Assembly of France has created tools using open data to model fiscal and social impacts and to compare draft bills with existing legislation.

Perhaps the most comprehensive example is Brazil’s Ulysses Suite, an integrated parliamentary AI ecosystem supporting everything from bill analysis to citizen interaction. These cases reflect a broader trend: many parliaments are piloting AI for legislative research, amendment tracking, and committee support.

Yet experimentation alone does not equal transformation. Many pilots remain isolated, dependent on individual champions, or constrained by legacy systems and procurement rules.

Technology across the legislative cycle

The potential of AI becomes clearer when viewed across the full legislative cycle. As highlighted in the Course Manual for the Certified Course on Legislative Scrutiny and Technology, technology is already reshaping each phase of lawmaking.

  • During legislative drafting, AI-assisted tools can analyse vast corpora of statutes and case law, suggesting language aligned with existing norms and reducing ambiguity. This supports consistency without replacing human judgment.
  • In ex-ante impact assessment, predictive modelling and data analytics allow parliaments to interrogate the likely economic, social, or environmental consequences of proposed legislation. Such tools can surface unintended effects earlier in the process, strengthening evidence-based scrutiny.
  • Citizen engagement is also being transformed. Digital platforms enable large-scale consultations, while AI can help analyse submissions, identify patterns, and surface underrepresented perspectives. This is particularly valuable as consultation volumes increase beyond what manual analysis can reasonably handle. Some argue for a path of Augmented Deliberation regarding citizen-initiated mechanisms for democratic participation, including a governance roadmap of digital guardrails such as AI watermarking, public-interest AI platforms, and independent algorithmic audits.
  • Finally, in post-enactment analysis, data analytics can track implementation and outcomes, support post-legislative scrutiny and close feedback loops between lawmaking and lived experience.

These applications demonstrate that AI does not sit at the margins of parliamentary work. It intersects with core legislative functions.

The centrality of explainability

The opportunities are significant, but so are the risks. AI evolves faster than parliamentary cycles, creating persistent regulatory lag. Existing standing orders and parliamentary procedures rarely anticipate automated analysis or algorithmic support. Capacity gaps mean expertise is often concentrated in a handful of staff or external vendors, raising dependency risks.

There are also well-documented technical and ethical challenges: bias in training data, errors and “hallucinations” in generative AI, data protection concerns when handling sensitive parliamentary or constituency information, and the growing threat of AI-enabled disinformation through synthetic submissions, as analysed by OECD, among others.

Across all these risks, one principle stands out: explainability. As Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders have argued in their book “Rewiring Democracy”, democratic institutions cannot rely on systems they do not understand. If MPs and staff cannot interrogate how an AI tool reached a conclusion, its outputs cannot legitimately inform legislative scrutiny. Explainability is therefore not a technical luxury but a democratic requirement.

AI adoption is a change process, not a tech project

Too often, AI adoption is framed as a procurement or IT challenge. In reality, it is an institutional change process. Deploying tools without addressing underlying data quality, governance, skills, and culture will at best produce marginal gains, and at worst undermine trust.

Effective change requires attention to at least six interlinked elements: strategy, prioritisation, implementation, governance, training, and coordination. It involves iterative piloting rather than “big bang” rollouts; cross-parliamentary governance bodies rather than siloed initiatives; and continuous learning rather than one-off training.

Data governance is foundational. Without legislature-wide data maps, data management plans, and interoperable systems, AI outputs will be unreliable or biased. Treating data as a strategic asset is a precondition for any meaningful AI readiness.

Crucially, this change process also invites deeper reflection. Rethinking lawmaking in terms of “law as code”, exploring how digital tools reshape legislative design, and reimagining human oversight so that humans remain firmly “in the loop” are all parts of the transformation.

The theory of organizational change by sociologist Everett Rogers, called the Diffusion of Innovations, points at different categories how people adapt to proposed changes. In any organization, including in parliaments, some are innovators, early adapters, early majority, late majority and the laggards. The innovators are often in a minority, but their approach will determine if the majority adapts and accepts the proposed changes. Similar categories on people’s approach to change applies to parliaments when introducing AI in the parliamentary workspace.

Frameworks to guide the journey

Parliaments do not have to navigate this alone. The Guidelines for AI in Parliament, published by the WFD, provide a practical framework covering ethics, governance, capacity, and implementation. Complementing this, the IPU’s Maturity Framework for AI in Parliaments offers a self-assessment tool across six levels, from “initial” awareness to “leadership”, where parliaments act as global benchmarks. The UK Parliament has issued guidance to its Members on the use of generative AI tools.

Together, these frameworks suggest a pragmatic path forward: start with pilots, invest in data foundations, prioritise explainable systems, learn from peers, and embed AI within transparent, ethics-driven governance structures.

Bridging expertise: lawmaking, technology, and parliamentary strengthening

Finally, successful transformation depends on people as much as systems. One of the clearest lessons from comparative practice is the need to connect three communities that too often operate separately: lawmaking experts, technology specialists, and parliamentary strengthening practitioners.

This was the guiding logic behind the January 2026 Certified Course on Legislative Scrutiny and Technology, which deliberately brought these three perspectives together. Hence, it was co-organized by leaders in each of these three fields: Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) of the University of London, Popvox Foundation and WFD. Legislative quality scholars, parliamentary officials, technology specialists, and democracy practitioners all contributed to a shared understanding: AI in parliament is not just about efficiency, but about safeguarding democratic legitimacy in an age of acceleration.

The rise of AI and legislative technology is not merely an administrative upgrade. It is a fundamental institutional challenge. If parliaments fail to adapt, the pacing problem will deepen, oversight will weaken, and democratic accountability will erode. If they succeed, AI can become a powerful ally in strengthening scrutiny, transparency, and public trust.

About the author

Franklin De Vrieze is the Head of Practice Accountability at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy.

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A committee is an organisation, not an institution – but what is an organisation? A response mainly to myself

By Stephen Holden Bates

I was surprised to read in John Connolly, Matthew Flinders and David Judge’s recent article on House of Lords committees that a co-authored paper of mine – indeed, one where I was the corresponding author – was used to support the view that committees should be considered institutions, rather than organisations. That’s strange, I thought, because that’s not what I think. However, there it is in black and white in our abstract (and again on page 437): “committees are institutions embedded in wider social structures”[1]. Below I set out why I think I was wrong to state that committees are institutions rather than organisations and why this categorisation matters. 

In defining committees as institutions rather than organisations, Connolly, Flinders and Judge follow the usage adopted by Longley and Davidson[2], citing the distinction drawn between them by Douglas North. In almost certainly the most famous and popular definition out there, North defines institutions as “the rules of the game in a society or, more formally… the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction”. They consist of “both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights)”. Organisations, according to North, are “groups of individuals bound by some common purpose to achieve objectives” and include “political bodies (political parties, the Senate, a city council, a regulatory agency), economic bodies (firms, trade unions, family farms, cooperatives), social bodies (churches, clubs, athletic associations), and educational bodies (schools, universities, vocational training centers)”.

It is not clear to me (and why I am so upset with myself) why, after reading these definitions, you would then want to categorise committees as institutions. It is true that some institutionalist scholars, such as Peters, argue that it is difficult to differentiate between institutions and organisations in practice. It is also true that other institutionalist scholars, such as Lagroye[3], are more concerned with the particular research programme surrounding some social phenomenon that may or may not be called an institution or an organisation, rather than whether the social phenomenon is correctly labelled as such. It is also true that yet more institutionalist scholars, such as Hodgson, have suggested that organisations are a special kind of institution. However, even if you follow Hodgson, organisations-as-special-institutions would seem the appropriate label for committees, rather than simply institutions.

Contra Hodgson, I would want to maintain a sharp ontological distinction between institutions and organisations, even if they are always empirically intertwined. Drawing on Archer, institutions are part of the cultural fabric of society and organisations are part of the structural fabric. In making this distinction, I would also want to adopt definitions which differ slightly from North’s definitions above. Institutions are “systems of established rules, conventions, norms, values and customs; [they] consist of, or are constituted by, established rules, conventions, norms, values and customs”. Organisations are particular kinds of meso- or micro-level (depending on size!) social structures – “systems of human relations among social positions”. Following Elder Vass, those social positions which comprise organisations tend to be specialised and related hierarchically, although not always.

If we take UK Select Committees as an example (because that’s basically all I know about), select committees are organisations[4] made up of certain specialised social positions – chair, member, clerk, operations manager, media and communications officer, etc. – which are occupied by MPs and parliamentary staff and which have (relatively) defined chains of command. Committees-as-organisations are enmeshed within, and shaped by, numerous formal and informal institutions[5] (which are reciprocally shaped by the committees and the individuals who work within them). Some of these institutions operate within specific committees (for example, the custom in at least one committee that there is an unofficial Deputy Chair); some operate system-wide and at the level of Parliament (for example, the formal, codified rule that every government department will have a select committee shadowing it, or the informal convention that the Treasury Committee is chaired by an MP from the government benches, or the value of consensus that permeates committee interactions); and some are societal-wide (for example, laws regarding employment practices, or norms regarding acceptable behaviour during meetings). 

Why does it matter if we understand committees, not as institutions, but as organisations and, particularly, as organisations in the manner outlined above? Drawing on critical realist thinking, I would like to suggest it matters for at least two interrelated reasons. First, while both organisations and institutions contribute to outcomes, they contribute in different ways. Organisations and institutions are different kinds of social entities with different causal powers and mechanisms. For example, to use Elder-Vass’s phrase, coordinated interaction is an emergent property of organisations due to the way in which they bring individuals together through authority relations and within specialist positions. It is the coordinated interaction mechanisms of organisations which allows for the production of communal effort, a common purpose, and collective reflexivity, identity and strategic calculation, even if those outcomes are also mediated by norms of behaviour. So, the ability of a chair and members of a select committee to decide upon and subsequently run an inquiry, the forcefulness of committee recommendations, the efficiency and resourcefulness of parliamentary staff, and the reputation of committee chairs are due not only to parliamentary rules (institutions) and the intellect, charisma, etc. of individuals (agency) but also, crucially, the way in which those individuals are related to each other (organisation). Again drawing on Elder-Vass, if the MPs and parliamentary staff concerned were not organised into such committee organisations, these powers of select committees – to set the (parliamentary) agenda, to shape government policy, to raise the parliamentary and media profile of whoever is Chair – would not exist.

This, then, points to a second, larger reason why it is important to reflect on what committees are: our answer helps point us towards a particular way of looking at the world and, in turn, a particular kind of political science (and, indeed, a particular kind of politics). Understanding committees as organisations as outlined above is to make an ontological commitment about the social world that goes beyond the commitment made when understanding them as institutions and, by implication, as intersubjective elements of the cultural domain[6]. This understanding of organisations as structural “entities which ‘make a difference’ in their own right, rather than as mere sums of their parts” – as part of “the material circumstances in which people must act and which motivate them to act in certain ways” – helps to differentiate realists from: 

This particular realist view of committees-as-organisations, then, points us towards a particular kind of parliamentary studies; one which seeks causal explanations underpinned by a non-Humean notion of causality and within which structural features of parliaments and society contribute by necessity to such explanations, not only because they are analytically useful but also because they have a meaningful social reality. Conceptualising committees differently would likely lead us down another path of how to study parliaments.

Dr Stephen Holden Bates is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Birmingham.

[1] I put this lack of intellectual consistency and betrayal of my critical realist roots down to the fact that I was a father of 9-month-old twins at the time of submitting the article and had had about 3 minutes of sleep since they had arrived on the scene.

[2] Although note on page 5 that, when noting the vigour of modern-day committee systems, Longley and Davidson favourably quote Mattson and Strøm: “By broad consensus, committees are considered one of the most significant organizational features of modern parliaments” (emphasis added).

[3] Thanks to Claire Bloquet for discussions about French institutionalism and how it differs from versions I’m more familiar with.

[4] Which are part of a larger organisation called Parliament which, in turn, is part of a larger organisation called the state.

[5] As well as broader social structures.

[6] Or the non-commitment of not thinking the difference matters.

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How majoritarianism endures in the structures of the UK’s devolved institutions

Scotland and Wales’ devolved political institutions, elected under proportional Additional Member electoral systems, were intended to produce a more consensual political culture. However, writes Felicity Matthews, although their electoral rules have increased the proportionality of representation, the structures of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales have meant that a more consensual approach to policy-making has been more limited than might have been expected.

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Standing up for parliament: how non-elected officials represent parliament as an institution

In a new Political Studies article David Judge and Cristina Leston-Bandeira identify non-elected officials rather than elected members as those who ‘speak for’ and ‘act for’ parliaments as institutions most often. In this post, originally posted on The Constitution Unit, they discuss this paradox and some of their key findings in relation to the UK parliament.

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