Automated Decision-Making and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy in the Relocation of Discretion
Online talk by Eva Erman (Stockholm University) as part of the DEMOCRACY & AI series.
Automated decision-making (ADM) systems are increasingly adopted in public administration, shifting discretionary power from street-level bureaucrats to upstream system-level actors. This paper develops a theoretical framework consisting of three conditions – political equality, democratic agency, and accountability – to analyse the implications of this relocation for democratic legitimacy. We argue that ADM should not be evaluated only in terms of efficiency, accuracy, or error reduction, but as a transformation that potentially weakens the chain connecting citizens to the authors of public decisions, altering who effectively participates in public reasoning and who can be held responsible for authoritative decisions. Using cases such as Sweden’s publicly developed KROM system and Michigan’s privatised MiDAS system, we show that not all relocations of discretion are normatively equivalent. When discretion remains inside publicly accountable institutions, democratic legitimacy can be preserved even if decision-making becomes more technical and centralised. By contrast, when discretion is shifted to private vendors, equal standing is impaired, participatory contestation becomes harder, and responsibility is diffused across agencies, contractors, and technical intermediaries. Our democratic approach sets us apart from related normative analyses of ADM discretion, which focus more on individual moral wrongs. While these analyses identify concrete mechanisms of harm at the individual and organisational levels, our framework connects them to the polity level, demonstrating how privatised discretion relocation threatens citizens' collective status as equals in norm-making and contestation, thereby eroding core conditions of democratic legitimacy.
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DEMOCRACY & AI is a series of online talks exploring the political thought, theory, and philosophy of artificial intelligence. Envisioned as an international platform for the politics-and-AI research community, the series aims to bring voices together to examine how AI is shaping democracy, both positively and negatively.