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Civic Reflexivity Engines:
A New Framework for Democratic AI Governance

This paper introduces Civic Reflexivity Engines (CREs) — an entirely new institutional form in which algorithmic systems function not as decision-makers, but as instruments of collective self-examination. Rejecting the exhausted binary of "optimise or regulate," the work proposes reflexive co-constitution as its theoretical foundation — a paradigm where AI and civic judgment continuously reshape one another, shifting computation from prediction to interrogation, from automation to exposure, and from sovereignty to translation. Democracy is reconceptualised not as a voting mechanism but as a metabolic system capable of ingesting complexity, processing contradiction, and transforming insight into institutional learning. This represents the first comprehensive proposal for reflexivity as an infrastructural layer of governance — grounded in Helix Thinking methodology and supported by deployable prototypes from the Kallol Research Hub ecosystem.