Artificial Intelligence in Citizenship and Civic Education: A PRISMA 2020 Systematic Review of Digital Citizenship, AI Literacy and Democratic Engagement

Abstract

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving quickly from a backstage administrative tool to a force that shapes how young people learn to be citizens. Yet the evidence on AI within democratic, citizenship and civic education has not been gathered systematically. Objective: This review maps the peer-reviewed evidence on AI in citizenship-related education published between January 2018 and April 2026. Methods: Following the PRISMA 2020 statement, structured searches across seven databases (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, DOAJ, Dimensions, Semantic Scholar and Crossref) returned 1,272 records; after de-duplication and two-stage screening, 27 studies met the criteria, were charted on a common extraction matrix, and were analysed using thematic synthesis. Results: A central empirical finding is the complete absence of eligible studies between 2018 and 2023: no included work predates 2024, and activity surges sharply in 2025, mapping almost exactly onto the public release of generative AI tools in late 2022. The corpus is led by China, Indonesia and the United States, and is dominated by reviews, conceptual frameworks and quantitative survey work, with only one controlled experiment. Eight themes were synthesised, the largest being governance and ethical risk, AI-literacy frameworks, and digital-citizenship formation. Conclusions: AI is most often treated as something citizens must be made literate about and protected from, rather than a settled instructional method for civic learning. The field needs stronger causal designs, wider geographic coverage, and clearer links between AI literacy and substantive democratic competence.