Democracy 2.0: Continuous Civic Feedback, Civic Capital, and Participatory Public Infrastructure

Democracy 2.0 develops a modular institutional framework for adding persistent, structured citizen feedback to representative democracy without replacing legislatures, executives, courts, expert agencies, constitutional constraints, or representative judgment. The paper examines Civic Feedback and Civic Capital as separable mechanisms; purpose-specific identity and credential architecture; evidence-linked accountability through the Politika research testbed; citizen-directed public political finance; public-investment feedback; and institutional safeguards intended to limit concentration of authority and function creep. Part I develops the general institutional architecture and derives testable hypotheses. Part II applies a scenario-based total-cost-of-ownership framework to the United States, explicitly distinguishing empirical baselines from illustrative D2.0 assumptions. Part III proposes a bounded New York City pilot, New York Coin, designed to test recurring Civic Feedback, participation-linked Civic Capital, circulation and settlement behavior, privacy, administrative integration, and related legal and fiscal constraints. This working paper is a research prospectus and institutional-design framework. It does not claim empirical validation of Democracy 2.0 or establish that the proposed mechanisms outperform incumbent democratic or administrative institutions. Its purpose is to define falsifiable propositions, identify unresolved institutional tensions, and provide a foundation for subsequent empirical, legal, economic, and pilot research.