Democratic theory has traditionally focused on visible institutions - legislatures, courts, bureaucracies. Yet governance is increasingly embedded in design: the protocols, algorithms, and digital infrastructures through which citizens access rights, services, and public life. This panel examines architectural power - the capacity to govern through the structuring of environments and systems rather than through explicit law or coercion.
Architectural power is invisible, systemic, and structurally resistant to democratic oversight. From India's Aadhaar to China's Social Credit System, from EU digital identity frameworks to US algorithmic welfare - infrastructure governs. We invite paper presentations that engage critically with this phenomenon. We seek contributions that examine specific cases where digital or physical infrastructure has displaced or bypassed formal political processes, analyse how private actors, technocrats, or platforms have acquired governance functions without democratic mandate, investigate the accountability gaps created when political choices are embedded in technical systems, and propose legal, institutional, or participatory frameworks to make architectural power visible, contestable, and democratically controlled.
