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 naturally 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 efficiency and usage of these systems in different societal areas while also bearing the responsibility of safeguarding citizens from potential 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 analysed party programs in terms of both discourse around artificial intelligence and policy recommendations within an election context. This study focuses on the Netherlands and considers and provides an empirical analysis to answer the following question: How do parties discuss AI in their political programs for the 2023 election in the Netherlands? We conducted a manual content analysis of all party manifestos for the 2023 elections in the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that most parties are not laying 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. We critically discuss the low level of politicisation of AI with a focus on practical governance issues that emerge as a result.