Cited by 334Ethics and Social Impacts of AIExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)E-Government and Public Services

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 61 of the 65 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 39 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Artificial intelligence, transparency, and public decision-making: Why explanations are key when trying to produce perceived legitimacy

Open access
de Fine Licht, Karl, de Fine Licht, Jenny·2020·AI & SOCIETY

Abstract

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for making decisions in public affairs has sparked a lively debate on the benefits and potential harms of self-learning technologies, ranging from the hopes of fully informed and objectively taken decisions to fear for the destruction of mankind. To prevent the negative outcomes and to achieve accountable systems, many have argued that we need to open up the “black box” of AI decision-making and make it more transparent. Whereas this debate has primarily focused on how transparency can secure high-quality, fair, and reliable decisions, far less attention has been devoted to the role of transparency when it comes to how the general public come to perceive AI decision-making as legitimate and worthy of acceptance. Since relying on coercion is not only normatively problematic but also costly and highly inefficient, perceived legitimacy is fundamental to the democratic system. This paper discusses how transparency in and about AI decision-making can affect the public’s perception of the legitimacy of decisions and decision-makers and produce a framework for analyzing these questions. We argue that a limited form of transparency that focuses on providing justifications for decisions has the potential to provide sufficient ground for perceived legitimacy without producing the harms full transparency would bring.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

The paper argues that for AI in public decision-making, full transparency about decision-making processes is not necessarily legitimacy-enhancing and may even backfire. It proposes that a limited transparency focused on justifications—transparency in rationale—can better support public perceptions of legitimacy.

Key findings

  • The paper distinguishes transparency about final decisions, transparency in process, and transparency in rationale; it argues decision-makers should generally opt for transparency in rationale, meaning justifications for decisions plus information on who is accountable.
  • It identifies four arguments for full transparency—public scrutiny, public understanding, feelings of control, and fairness perceptions—and argues each can fail or harm perceived legitimacy due to problems such as information overload, the “transparency paradox,” the “myth of hidden politics,” and disappointment with real-world “muddling through.”
  • A justifications approach is argued to support accountability, higher-quality decisions through the giving-reasons requirement, public understanding, and perceptions of fair treatment; AI assistants should explain decisions in accessible language and make clear who is accountable or where to appeal.
  • The paper offers a framework dividing AI public decision-making into three phases: goal-setting, coding, and implementation; transparency in rationale can be applied in each phase.

Methods

  • Conceptual/theoretical paper; no empirical data, sample, or statistical analysis are reported.
  • It synthesizes social science literature on transparency, legitimacy, principal-agent theory, deliberative democracy, and explainable AI to build an argument and framework.
  • The main analysis is normative and argumentative, proposing a framework for transparency and perceived legitimacy in AI decision-making in the socio-technical system.

Limitations

  • The authors state that their analysis “builds on a considerable number of assumptions and guesses” and call for theoretical and empirical work on justifications, normatively acceptable reasons, how justifications should be designed and presented, empirically grounded policy design, and how decisions are perceived when made by humans versus AIs.
  • The text makes evident that the argument is not empirically tested and relies on literature-based reasoning and examples rather than new data.
  • The paper’s main focus is public policymaking and authoritative public decisions, though the authors say the general argument should also apply to AI use in more private operations.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/s00146-020-00960-w

Cites

61 of 61 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Figures

Fig. 1 The three phases of AI decision-making
Fig. 1 The three phases of AI decision-makingCC-BY · From the PDF

Verification

Claims the paper makes

58 Own interpretation · 25 Not checked yet · 3 No basis given

Verify all 39 references — free account

Show all 34 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 29
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 32
52 of 52
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Relying on coercion is normatively problematic, costly, and highly inefficient, and perceived legitimacy is fundamental to the democratic system.

    “Since relying on coercion is not only normatively problematic but also costly and highly inefficient, perceived legitimacy is fundamental to the democratic system.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The public needs a chance to actually understand the code for transparency to have positive effects.

    “assuming that the public needs a chance to actually understand the code”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The general public will not understand the source code.

    “even though the general public will not understand it”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Perceived legitimacy is the goal of transparency in AI decision-making.

    “if perceived legitimacy is the goal”
    “When realizing perceived legitimacy, we should, as a default, opt for having our AI assistants explain themselves rather than open up their code, etc. for public scrutiny.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    Sufficient mechanisms for accountability are in place.

    “given, of course, that sufficient mechanisms for accountability are in place”
    “given of course that sufficient mechanisms for accountability are in place”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The general public is not particularly interested in political matters.

    “For a general public that is not particularly interested in political matters”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Decision-makers are servants of the public.

    “their position as servants of the public”
7 of 7

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

1 of 1

Citations

Cites

Show all 65 references

Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Fearon J (1998) Deliberation and discussion. In: Elster J (ed) Deliberative democracy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
  2. Fenster M (2006) The opacity of transparency. Iowa Law Rev 91(3):885–949
  3. Lepri B, Oliver N, Letouzé E, Pentland A, Vinck P (2017) Fair, transparent, and accountable algorithmic decision-making processes. Philos Technol 2017:1–17
  4. Thelisson E, Padh K, Celis LE (2017) Regulatory mechanisms and algorithms towards trust in AI/ML. In: Proceedings of the IJCAI 2017 workshop on explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), Melbourne, Australia
  5. Warren ME, Mansbridge J (2013) Deliberative Negotiation. In: Mansbridge J, Martin CJ (eds) Negotiating agreement in politics: report of the task force on negotiating in politics. American Political Science Association, Washington

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 201–300 of 327

Metadata

Authors
de Fine Licht, K., & de Fine Licht, J.
Venue
AI & SOCIETY
Published
2020-03-19
Volume
35
Issue
4
Pages
917-926
ISSN
  • 0951-5666 (ISSN-L)
  • 1435-5655
OpenAlex
W3011363941
Cited by
334
References
65
Citations by year
2026: 83 · 2025: 78 · 2024: 56 · 2023: 49 · 2022: 41 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 6
FWCI
39.87
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • AI & Society (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • Chalmers Research (Chalmers University of Technology) (submittedVersion)
Funders
Chalmers Tekniska Högskola
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › E-Government and Public Services
Keywords
transparency, perceived legitimacy, black box problem, accountability, justification of decisions, democratic legitimacy, public acceptance of AI

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-08, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).

A second model labelled each claim on 2026-10-08 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review