AI governance in the spotlight: an empirical analysis of Dutch political parties’ strategies for the 2023 elections

AI-based technologies are having an increasing impact on society, which raises the question of how this technology will be addressed politically. Thereby, political actors have a dual role to play: They can provide investment to enhance the development and subsequent adoption of these systems while also bearing the responsibility of safeguarding citizens from harm. Hereby, the degree of politicization of the topic, i.e. if a topic is part of the public and political debate, has an immense influence on the political approach to tackle the issue. The more a topic is politicized, the more urgency political parties experience to develop concrete governance approaches. Yet, existing research has not analyzed party programs in terms of discourse around artificial intelligence and policy recommendations. This study focuses on the Netherlands and explores how Dutch political parties discuss AI in their political programs for the 2023 election. We conducted a manual content analysis of all party manifestos for the 2023 elections. Our analysis shows that most parties do not place a big emphasis on AI. And if so, most of the policy proposals are rather reactive to issues that happened in the past, rather than taking a prospective governance approach.