*Abstract* :
The integration of automated decision-making (ADM), predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence into public administration is fundamentally reshaping state authority. While digital infrastructure promises efficiency, it challenges the core tenets of democratic governance, administrative law, and public accountability. This panel interrogates the political and normative implications of this transition, focusing on the friction between technocratic optimization and democratic legitimacy.
This panel seeks to address three key dimensions of the automated state:
The Accountability Deficit: How algorithmic opacity and proprietary code bypass traditional requirements for administrative transparency and justification.
The Automation of Discretion: The ways in which algorithmic tools reshape or displace the situational judgment of street-level bureaucrats, often institutionalising systemic biases.
The Privatisation of Sovereignty: How reliance on private technology vendors shifts public policy design from democratic oversight to corporate software architecture.
By bridging public administration, political theory, and comparative politics, this panel aims to explore how diverse institutional regimes can assert public values over automated systems, ensuring that digital state capacity does not compromise democratic accountability.
