Political Legitimacy and Artificial Intelligence: What Digital Tools Can Restore Citizens’ Trust in the DRC?
Since 2006, the Democratic Republic of Congo has held several electoral cycles without managing to build lasting trust between citizens and their institutions. My research in political science on the erosion of political legitimacy shows that this trust deficit is not only about contested results, but about the perceived opacity of the processes themselves: who decides, under what rules, and with what independent oversight?
It is precisely at this level, that of processes rather than outcomes alone, that digital tools and artificial intelligence can make a concrete contribution, provided they are not presented as a magic solution to what is, first and foremost, a political problem.
Three concrete uses, already proven elsewhere
First, traceability of public consultations: simple digital platforms can timestamp and publish, in real time, the minutes of citizen or provincial consultations, making it far harder to rewrite the calendar or content of exchanges after the fact.
Second, open-data analysis applied to public finances: AI tools now within reach can automatically cross-reference approved budgets, actual disbursements, and public procurement contracts, flagging significant discrepancies to civil society and investigative journalists without waiting years for an institutional audit.
Third, countering electoral disinformation: automated viral-rumor verification systems, paired with multilingual chatbots (French, Lingala, Swahili, Kikongo, Tshiluba) distributing verified official information, shrink the space left for last-minute manipulation of the kind that undermined the credibility of previous elections.
What technology cannot solve on its own
None of these tools replaces the political will to be held accountable. An open budget dashboard only has value if the discrepancies it reveals trigger a real institutional response. A transparent consultation platform only makes sense if the participation rules themselves are perceived as fair. In other words, digital tools can make visible what was hidden; they cannot, on their own, produce the trust that only consistent political practice, sustained over time, can build.
A proposal for the current debate
As a new national dialogue sequence opens, I argue for an explicit digital component to be built into the preparatory phase itself: systematic publication of provincial consultation minutes on a single, permanent portal; a public dashboard tracking the calendar and milestones of the process; and an independent citizen reporting mechanism for irregularities, moderated by a coalition of civil-society organizations rather than a single institution. These are technically simple choices to implement; whether or not they are adopted will reveal a great deal about the sincerity of the transparency the process’s own actors claim to embrace.