Digital Twins: Designing Politics and Public Administration

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Digital Politics, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, internet of things, and digital twins are reshaping models and systems for managing, organizing, and interacting with our social and political environments.These technologies have been widely adopted in the private sector, where corporations leverage them to optimize production processes and personalize services, often with high economic returns. Only recently they have begun to expand into the public sector, opening up significant opportunities to enhance public administration by transforming its structures and practices, using data for public innovation and socio-political design. One of the most advanced frontiers in Digital Innovation, “Digital twins” affect models and systems for managing, and interacting with, the social and political reality around us. This emerging technology is not limited to representing material entities, whether built or natural, but also extends to processes, organizations, and even people, dynamically reproducing all the characteristics of the represented entity by constantly updating data in real time. 
The rapid spread of Digital Twins on a global scale stimulates the investigation of new opportunities for the public sector. Indeed, new frontiers in development and research are opening up in a variety of areas, from governance to public administration and from active citizenship to data architecture, necessitating opportunities for systematic insights into the changes that are under way. We invite interdisciplinary proposals that explore these and related topics, encouraging cross-field dialogue to fully assess the implications and potential of digital technologies on politics and policy with special reference to digital twins. Contributions may focus on specific applications, theoretical insights, or comparative perspectives, expanding on emerging trends and future developments in digital politics.