Working Paper
Stage 2 argues that the democratic challenge posed by algorithmic systems cannot be adequately framed at the level of quantitative outputs alone. Much of the existing literature operates at this level, quantifying democratic threats and identifying what backsliding states are doing to democracy (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018; Bermeo, 2016; Feldstein, 2021). Important as this work is, what is at stake is something more fundamental. I approach the problem from the perspective of democratic agency. Where the conditions under which individuals become political agents are shaped by systems that are privately governed, subject to commercial pressures and, often, antagonistic to meaningful contestation, the foundations of democratic legitimacy are compromised before any quantifiable democratic activity takes place. Existing frameworks approach this problem, but, crucially, do not resolve it. They do, however, provide insight into how we can interpret and provide a solution. This section identifies why we fall short and develops the theoretical foundation necessary to do so.
The argument proceeds in three steps. First, drawing on Habermas (2022) and Zuboff (2019), I establish what architectural neutrality requires of a communicative environment and how its absence compromises both the horizontal conditions of political communication and the vertical conditions of democratic governance. Second, drawing on Dean (2009), Danaher (2016) and Pasquale (2019), I identify the consequences of that loss: why citizens cannot recognise the structural erosion of their agency and why existing governance frameworks cannot reach the architectural level at which that erosion occurs. Third, drawing on Gowder (2023) and Forst (2017, 2024), I establish that platforms operating at scale exercise a form of power analogous to sovereign authority. Democratic legitimacy, on Forst’s account, rests on a prior obligation of justification owed by those who exercise power to those subject to it. Platforms have acquired the reach of that power without accepting its justificatory obligations. It is the gap between the power platforms exercise and the accountability they accept that the ninth dimension is designed to capture.
Democracy depends on informed public opinion. This allows for participation and accountability to happen. In this respect, Habermas’s account of the ‘public sphere’ provides a useful starting point for understanding the democratic threat posed by algorithmic systems. He locates the public sphere within the “functionally differentiated structure of modern societies between civil society and the political system” (Habermas, 2022, p. 146). Civil society here is understood as the everyday practices of public discussion, association and opinion formation among citizens. The political system is understood as the institutional setting in which binding collective decisions are made, a core condition of democratic government. The public sphere operates between civil society and the political system by organising public opinion and transmitting it toward political authority.
This provides a normative baseline. For the public sphere to perform this function, it must be capable of operating without distortion, carrying the authentic preferences and demands of citizens toward the institutions that are accountable to them. What is constitutive of the public sphere, on Habermas’s account, is not the form participation takes but “the topics that deserve shared interest and the respective professionally examined form and rationality of the contributions” that make mutual understanding possible (Habermas, 2022, p. 165). In Diamond and Morlino’s terms, this is the prior condition of vertical accountability. They define accountability as “the obligation of elected political leaders to answer for their political decisions when asked by voters or constitutional bodies” and note that it requires “fairly robust levels of voter interest, information, and turnout” (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, p. 25). Citizens can only hold governments to account if the opinions and preferences they bring to that process are authentically their own. Where the public sphere is distorted, vertical accountability is compromised before it begins. Diamond and Morlino’s framework measures accountability at the institutional level, asking if elections are free and fair, do leaders answer for their decisions and if citizens can remove governments from office (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, p. 25). These are vital measures. But they presuppose that the opinions and preferences citizens bring to those institutional processes are authentically their own. Where algorithmic systems shape what citizens encounter, curate their engagement and determine what they understand themselves to want before any institutional interaction takes place, that presupposition fails. It is this prior architectural level, the conditions under which democratic agency itself is formed, that Diamond and Morlino’s framework does not yet reach.
Habermas develops this argument directly. He argues that algorithm-controlled platforms are “far from neutral” in their operation, actively distorting the deliberative conditions on which democratic legitimacy depends (Habermas, 2022, p. 163). Part of what makes this distortion so significant is that platforms are not simply a new form of media. Habermas is explicit on this point: the new media “are not ‘media’ in the established sense” because, unlike traditional press, radio or television, they “neither produce, nor edit nor select” communicative content (Habermas, 2022, p. 159). Instead they act as intermediaries “without responsibility”, establishing connections and intensifying discourses with “unpredictable contents” while profoundly altering “the character of public communication itself” (Habermas, 2022, p. 159). This distinction matters for the argument advanced in this paper. The democratic threat identified here is not solely a social media problem, though social media is part of it. It is an algorithmic problem. What is at stake is not the medium through which communication occurs but the algorithmic logic that increasingly governs what citizens encounter, how institutions process demands and how decisions about individuals are made. Whether that logic operates through a social media feed, a welfare eligibility system, a policing tool or a border control algorithm, the democratic stakes are the same. The medium is visible. The algorithm is not. Where platforms once promised to extend and democratise the public sphere, giving voice to citizens previously excluded from editorial media, that promise has been overtaken by a commercial logic that fragments public communication into self-enclosed echo chambers, rewarding engagement over deliberation and sensation over reasoned exchange (Habermas, 2022, pp. 159–160). The result is a structural weakening of the conditions under which public opinion can form in ways that are democratically meaningful. What citizens experience as political participation increasingly reflects an algorithmically curated environment rather than the kind of open rational-critical exchange the public sphere requires.
This structural condition is not simply contextual. It is located in the architecture of platforms rather than in the behaviour of individual users or the content they encounter. This matters because it shifts the level at which democratic analysis needs to operate. If the problem were behavioural or contextual, existing and evolving regulatory mechanisms could resolve this. Because it is architectural, they cannot. However, Habermas’s account has a significant limitation for the purposes of this investigation. His primary concern is with how algorithmic fragmentation disrupts the formation of public opinion and weakens its transmission toward political authority. In Diamond and Morlino’s terms, this is a problem of vertical accountability. On their account, citizens cannot effectively hold governments responsible if the opinion formation process has been structurally distorted before it reaches institutional processes (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, p. 25). The disruption of citizen-to-citizen communication that Habermas identifies is part of this problem, but it is not the whole of it. What Habermas does not fully address is a second and deeper facet of the architectural problem. Where the first operates within the public sphere, distorting the conditions of citizen communication and opinion formation, the second operates entirely outside it. This is the executive or administrative face of algorithmic power. It encompasses the procurement and deployment of algorithmic systems by public authorities to make or inform decisions about citizens in domains such as welfare, policing and border control. These systems do not distort participation in the public sphere. Prior to the use of digital algorithmic tools, they did not form part of the public sphere. The systems bypass the public sphere entirely, shaping decisions about individuals before any democratic process engages. It is to this dimension, and to the theoretical tools necessary to diagnose it, that the investigation now turns.
Zuboff’s account of surveillance capitalism clarifies the commercial logic driving both sides of the architectural problem. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), she identifies a fundamental transformation in the operational logic of digital platforms. What platforms present as open participatory environments are, architecturally, systems designed to extract behavioural data, convert it into predictive products and deploy those products to modify future conduct. It takes the now and creates the then. Platforms are not neutral carriers of human interaction. They are active participants in shaping it, positioned toward commercially determined ends that are structurally hidden from the scrutiny of those subject to them. Zuboff terms this form of power “instrumentarianism”, a power that “knows and shapes human behaviour toward others’ ends” operating not through direct coercion but through “the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of ‘smart’ networked devices, things and spaces” (Zuboff, 2019, p. 8). This formulation is significant for two reasons. First, it provides an explanation of the logic beneath Habermas’s observation that platforms operate “far from neutral” and act as intermediaries “without responsibility” — the distortion of the public sphere is not incidental to platform design but structurally necessary to it. Second, and crucially for the argument advanced here, Zuboff’s own language reaches beyond consumer-facing platforms. Smart networked devices, things and spaces: the architecture of welfare eligibility systems, facial recognition tools and border control algorithms. More significantly, it is the architecture within which political reasoning increasingly occurs. The implications of that observation for democratic legitimacy will be developed in stage 3 of this argument.
For the purposes of this investigation, what is significant is not simply the commercial logic Zuboff identifies, but its impact on democracy. Where the informational environment through which citizens encounter political life is created by systems organised for engagement and behavioural modification rather than deliberative exchange, the conditions of the public sphere are compromised before political activity begins.1 Here Zuboff’s diagnosis partners with Habermas’s normative baseline. What appears as open participation moves, architecturally, from what is actually delivered. The gap between appearance and operation that Zuboff identifies is not a consumer protection problem which could be remedied with legislation. It is a structural condition of democratic life.
Zuboff’s account addresses the first facet of the architectural problem more fully than the second. Her analysis remains primarily oriented toward consumer-facing platforms, the visible, user-facing architecture of social media and search engines. What it does not fully address is the second facet: the deployment of algorithmic systems by public authorities to make or inform decisions about citizens outside the public sphere. The extractive logic she identifies is not confined to the relationship between platforms and their users. The UK’s deployment of algorithmic tools by the DWP to assess benefit eligibility and the use of live facial recognition by UK police forces illustrate how the same structural conditions, opacity, insulation from contestation and the prior structuring of outcomes, reappear in the governance context. In both cases, decisions about individuals are shaped by systems whose logic is proprietary and resistant to conventional challenge (for a fuller treatment of these and related cases, see Stage 1). The difference from the consumer-facing context is significant: the power being exercised is not commercial but administrative. Its consequences for individuals as political agents are correspondingly more direct and immediate.
This application of Zuboff’s logic is not merely speculative. Regulatory and legal developments across the UK and Europe confirm that the democratic implications of algorithmic deployment are increasingly recognised and contested.2 The deployment of algorithmic decision-making systems by public authorities has generated a growing body of legal and regulatory scrutiny, precisely because the accountability frameworks designed for human administrative decision-making do not map cleanly onto systems whose logic is locked away from conventional forms of interrogation. What Zuboff identifies as a feature of surveillance capitalism, the structural insulation of algorithmic logic from meaningful challenge, reappears in the governance context as a feature of algorithmic administration. Across both the commercial and administrative domains, the consequence is the same: individuals are subject to systems that shape their political environment and their administrative reality without being able to challenge the logic by which those systems operate.
A critical dimension of this architectural problem is identified by Dean. In Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (2009), she argues that contemporary capitalism has transformed political communication into what she terms ‘communicative capitalism’, a condition in which the circulation of messages has become an end in itself rather than a means to political action. Citizens engage continuously, but that activity does not accumulate into political will or meaningful democratic change. Dean terms this the ‘illusion of participation’: the feeling of engagement substitutes for its democratic substance (Dean, 2009, pp. 22–24). Crucially, this is not a claim about deception or manipulation. Citizens are active and engaging. The problem is structural. The architecture of communicative capitalism captures political energy and recirculates it without directing it toward democratic ends. Core to this is the purpose of the algorithm. Its success is measured not by democratic quality but by commercial performance — hits, length of engagement, return visits. Democratic activity is not a KPI. If democratic engagement occurs, it is a byproduct of a system designed for something else entirely. Where political content drives engagement the algorithm will amplify it not because it serves democratic ends but because it serves commercial ones. Divisive, emotionally charged political content drives engagement. The architecture does not distinguish between deliberation and outrage. Both register as engagement.
The empirical picture of internet use in 2025 illustrates the scale of this condition. More than half of all internet users globally report finding information and keeping up to date with news and events as primary reasons for using the internet, with 62.8% and 55% respectively citing these motivations (Kemp, 2025, p. 65). This suggests an active and informed citizenry. However, the infrastructure through which that engagement occurs is dominated by platforms that are among the most legally and regulatorily contested. Included in the top ten of the most visited websites globally are those most algorithmically governed platforms, each optimised for engagement, retention and behavioural modification (Kemp, 2025, p. 109). The sites are Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and X. Citizens are informing themselves and following events, but doing so within environments whose architectural logic has been established, through Habermas and Zuboff, to not operate neutrally. Dean’s analysis explains why this matters: not to show that citizens are disengaged, but to show why sustained, high levels of engagement are not translating into meaningful democratic agency.
Dean’s argument does something analytically important that Zuboff’s does not. Where Zuboff identifies what is happening at the architectural level, Dean explains why it remains invisible to those subject to it. The experience of navigating the digital environment is indistinguishable from meaningful democratic participation. Citizens are genuinely doing things: contributing to a debate, signing a petition or reading a report. What they cannot perceive, from within that experience, is the degree to which the architecture has pre-structured what they encounter, how they engage and what kinds of political demands their activity is capable of generating.3
This has a direct consequence for the accountability argument. If citizens cannot perceive the structural conditions shaping their agency, they cannot identify what requires justification or to whom a justificatory demand should be addressed. The accountability problem is not simply a failure of regulators or legislators to act. Increasingly they do. Citizens cannot demand accountability for conditions they cannot perceive. The problem is epistemic: we do not know what to challenge or how to challenge. The architecture that shapes democratic agency is the same architecture that makes that shaping invisible. Zuboff identifies the opacity of the platform. Dean identifies the opacity of the experience. The result is a compound problem. The justificatory gap is structurally locked from the democratic challenge that might otherwise close it.
Dean’s account is primarily concerned with citizen communication and political expression, which is the face of the architectural problem that operates within the public sphere. Like Zuboff, however, it addresses the second facet only partially: the conditions under which political demands reach institutions that are themselves dependent on algorithmic systems operating beyond the reach of democratic challenge. A citizen may experience themselves as politically engaged, yet the degree to which they can perceive or contest the conditions shaping that experience is structurally limited. They will be unaware that decisions shaping their access to welfare, policing actions or their status at a border have already been made by systems whose logic they cannot inspect or contest. The illusion of participation operates on both sides of the architectural problem: in the public sphere and in the administrative domain where citizens are subjects rather than participants.
Dean’s identification of why citizens cannot perceive the erosion of their democratic agency opens the question of what conditions enable this to happen, the structural conditions that undermine democratic activity. Danaher provides an approach to framing the structural condition that produces it. In ‘The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation’ (2016), he defines algocracy as a governance system “in which algorithms are used to collect, collate and organise the data upon which decisions are typically made”, structuring and constraining “the ways in which humans within those systems interact with one another, the relevant data and the broader community affected by those systems” (Danaher, 2016, p. 247). The threat he identifies is located in what he calls the ‘opacity concern’ and the “growing use of algocratic systems” undermining “political authority and legitimacy” (Danaher, 2016, p. 249). The deficit produced by algorithmic governance is not a problem that data protection law or privacy regulation can resolve. It operates at the level of political authority and legitimacy, as Danaher notes, prior to and beyond the reach of those frameworks.
The democratic weakening of this condition is captured in Danaher’s argument. For him, legitimate decision-making procedures require participation in and comprehension of those procedures by the citizens they affect. Increasing reliance on algocratic systems limits both. The more algocratic a system is, the less legitimate it becomes, producing what Danaher terms the ‘human-out-of-the-loop’ condition (Danaher, 2016, p. 254). It is a structural condition that existing democratic mechanisms were not designed to address. Those mechanisms were designed for a world in which decision-makers are human, closer to Danaher’s human-in-the-loop model, and can be identified, questioned and held responsible. Contemporary algocratic systems resist this presupposition at every point. In Diamond and Morlino’s terms, the implications reach across multiple dimensions simultaneously. Participation is compromised where citizens engage within environments whose architectural logic pre-structures what they encounter. Responsiveness is compromised where governments respond to preferences already shaped by systems optimised for engagement rather than deliberation. The rule of law is compromised where legal frameworks designed for human decision-makers cannot reach the algorithmic conditions that precede their application. Each dimension registers a symptom. None reaches the structural condition that produces it.4
Writing in 2016, Danaher provided some prescience. We may, he suggests, “be on the cusp of creating a governance system which severely constrains and limits the opportunities for human engagement, without any readily available solution” (Danaher, 2016, p. 266). His concern for the future is instructive for our current position, in 2026, and for this argument in two key respects. First, the problem cannot be resolved by incremental adjustments to existing mechanisms. The structural condition is not open to procedural fixes. Second, Danaher’s account remains primarily concerned with governance systems in the conventional sense: the bureaucratic, legislative and legal processes increasingly reliant on algorithmic assistance. These are valuable contributions to democracy discussions. What is not fully addressed is the relationship between algocratic governance and the commercial platforms that shape the conditions of democratic agency in the public sphere. The opacity concern Danaher identifies operates on both facets of the architectural problem, but the legal and institutional frameworks he examines as possible responses are oriented primarily toward the administrative facet and, as he concludes, are unlikely to be sufficient.5
Where Danaher diagnoses the structural condition of algocratic governance, Pasquale identifies the legal dimension and intractability of interpretation of outputs. In doing so, he identifies what accountability would require and why it remains structurally out of reach in the absence of attribution to particular persons.
In ‘A Rule of Persons, Not Machines: The Limits of Legal Automation’ (2019), Pasquale demonstrates that the problem emerges as soon as algorithmic systems move beyond the trivial. Even in a relatively simple automated contract, an airline and insurer automating payments linked to oil prices, the moment something unexpected occurs, for example a bank payment failure, the system has no capacity for the contextual judgment that fairness requires. As Pasquale observes, “it is a far more formidable task to program that type of insight — let alone the ability to verify the factual predicates of each situation — into a single computer, or even into a network system” (Pasquale, 2019, p. 26). Where systems are simple and variables are few, automation works. Where human complexity is introduced, as it invariably does in border control, welfare eligibility or policing, the automated system cannot account for what it cannot anticipate. The legal response to this condition, Pasquale argues, requires that the adage “a rule of law, not of men” be complemented by a new commitment: “a rule of persons, not machines” (Pasquale, 2019, p. 7). Without attributing algorithmic judgments to particular persons and holding them responsible for explaining those judgments, legal automation undermines basic principles of accountability (Pasquale, 2019, p. 7). This is a precise legal-theoretical statement of the condition Danaher identifies structurally. The rule of law presupposes identifiable persons who can be held responsible. Where algorithmic systems displace those persons, the accountability chain that democratic legitimacy requires is broken, not because the law has been violated, but because the architecture of decision-making has moved beyond the reach of the persons the law was designed to govern.
The investigation so far has drawn on perspectives which allow us to frame the impact digital platforms have on democratic life. The problem is multi-faceted, requiring multiple theoretical approaches. Habermas provides a model of conditions of the public sphere, Zuboff gives a powerful account of the extractive logic that distorts the sphere, Dean encapsulates the epistemic gap leading to an illusion of participation, Danaher focuses us on the governance structures created which have brought us to an algocratic impasse and Pasquale draws on legal frameworks and the very real problem of if we pursue ‘rule by machines’. These models and warnings alert us to a structural implication. Taken together, these accounts converge on a structural implication that none fully resolves individually. The systems identified do not just influence democratic life from outside. They exercise a form of power that is functionally analogous to the power of states (Gowder, 2023, pp. 8, 43).
In The Networked Leviathan (2023), Gowder argues that it “should be clear, perhaps even uncontestable, that platforms do carry out some tasks that are meaningfully similar, in both their social role and in the constraints they face, to tasks carried out by states” (Gowder, 2023, p. 43).6 To strengthen this, Srivastava identifies platforms as a form of private authority engaged in “authoritative decision-making that was previously the prerogative of sovereign states” (Srivastava, 2021, p. 990). This private authority is not simply a metaphorical device referencing state power, it is, in some contexts, replicating it, as platforms simultaneously challenge and reshape the traditional role of states while being deployed by existing geopolitical powers to extend and exercise their authority (Srivastava, 2021, p. 995).
In the manner that states are formally equal but materially unequal, with some states capable of and willing to resist the constraints that smaller states cannot, platform power exists similarly. Larger platforms exercise their capacity to resist democratic accountability, challenging states’ authority to impose regulation. Srivastava identifies three distinct conditions through which this can be seen: interdependence, where states contract with and become dependent on Big Tech; circumvention, where platforms push against state overreach; and curtailment, where states attempt to regulate platforms (Srivastava, 2021, p. 995). These conditions can operate in parallel, often within the same state-platform relationship, creating a condition in which a state is simultaneously contractor and challenger. The European Union provides a precise illustration. The EU has pursued Meta under the Digital Services Act and the General Data Protection Regulation, issuing significant financial penalties and demanding structural changes to algorithmic systems (European Commission, IP/24/2373, 30 April 2024). At the same time, European public institutions, businesses and citizens remain deeply dependent on Meta’s infrastructure for communication, advertising and civic organisation. The same organisation is being regulated and relied upon simultaneously. Meta’s response has been one of contestation, disputing findings, challenging jurisdiction and threatening service withdrawal. This is not the behaviour of a regulated private entity. It is the behaviour of an actor that understands itself as occupying a position from which democratic constraint can be negotiated rather than simply accepted. Meta has positioned itself as being strong enough, in a state versus state model, to challenge the EU. The accountability gap this produces is not a failure of regulatory design, such design is continuous in an attempt to match technological change. It is a structural condition generated by actors who occupy a governance position for which existing democratic frameworks were not designed.
Srivastava’s conditions operate at three simultaneous levels, each reinforcing the others. At the first level, platforms exercise quasi-sovereign governance over citizens, shaping the conditions of democratic agency through algorithmic systems that citizens cannot address. At the second level, platforms function as instruments of state governance, contracted by public authorities to carry out administrative functions whose logic remains proprietary and unaccountable to scrutiny. As Srivastava observes, one outcome of state-platform interdependence is that “large, global, privately-owned platforms become the regulatory agents of nation states” (Srivastava, 2021, p. 995). At the third level, platforms actively contest the authority of democratic institutions to govern them. They do this not as regulated entities disputing individual findings but as actors asserting the primacy of their own governance frameworks over democratic constraint. Together the three levels produce a condition that the preceding accounts identify in part, but do not fully resolve. The democratic problem is not just one of inadequate regulation, it is unaccountability operating concurrently at three levels: as quasi-sovereign governors of citizens, as instruments of state governance whose logic evades scrutiny, and as actors capable of contesting democratic authority itself.
Gowder’s concern is that platforms lack the capacity to govern themselves responsibly. Platform self-control problems stem from “destructive methods of short-term profit seeking” and the dominance of engagement metrics over democratic considerations (Gowder, 2023, p. 4). The period between 2019 and 2021, during which platforms made their most assertive attempts at responsible self-governance, content moderation and election integrity measures, for example, represented an observable attempt at self-regulation. The systematic reversal of those commitments since 2022, across Meta, X and others, confirms precisely what Gowder voices concern about. Without external accountability mechanisms grounded in democratic legitimacy, platform governance defaults to commercially and politically expedient behaviour. His proposed solutions operate at the level of platform self-governance rather than democratic legitimacy itself. They address the symptom, inadequate capacity, without addressing the structural condition that produces it.
Together, the approaches examined in this stage map the structural condition. We are working with questions of what is wrong and what should be in place, the normative aspect. A normative framework must be capable of specifying why algocratic rule, for example, generates democratic obligations and what those obligations would require. The question of what legitimacy demands of actors who exercise constitutive power over persons as political agents, as platforms do, and what follows when that demand goes unmet, requires a further move. That pivot is provided by Forst.
Forst’s concept of noumenal power shifts analysis to a complementary framework, underpinned by the discussion above, specifically the space of reasons within which political agency is formed and exercised. Forst locates the real and general phenomenon of power not in physical force or institutional position but in what he calls the space of reasons, “the realm of justifications” (Forst, 2017, p. 38). To be a subject of power, on this account, is to be moved by reasons that others have provided, reasons that motivate thought and action in ways intended by the reason-giver. Power, in this sense, is not simply exercised by and over free agents; it is the structuring of the conditions within which those agents form their reasons in the first place. The precise formulation Forst offers is “to have and to exercise power means to be able — in different degrees — to influence, use, determine, occupy, or even seal off the space of reasons for others” (Forst, 2017, p. 42). This is a definition of power that operates prior to the observable exercise of force or institutional authority. It locates power at the architectural level, the level at which the conditions of reasoning itself are formed.
The implications for understanding how power works are significant. As Forst argues in The Noumenal Republic (2024), “we fail to understand how power is exercised … if we do not understand the justifications that guide people’s actions” (Forst, 2024, pp. 122–123). This is a direct claim about where power actually resides, in the structuring of justificatory conditions rather than in the observable outputs those conditions produce. It exists prior to whatever generates those outputs. The structural condition identified throughout Stage 2 operates at precisely this level. What Forst provides is the normative explanation for why that condition is democratically illegitimate: not merely harmful, though it may be, nor simply inadequately regulated, as the current position in 2026 reflects, but a violation of the conditions that democratic legitimacy itself requires.
This normative explanation rests on Forst’s principle of justification. Those subjected to a normative order, Forst argues, “should be its co-authors as equal participants and normative authorities in adequate justificatory practices that critically reflect on and constitute that order” (Forst, 2017, p. 42). This is the first demand of justice, to have standing as an equal normative authority within the order that governs you. The democratic expression of this principle is stated directly in his 2024 work: “democratic rule exists where those who are subjected to a normative order are at the same time the normative authorities who co-determine this order through corresponding justification procedures” (Forst, 2024, p. 187). Democratic legitimacy is not captured by elections, representation or the formal procedures of horizontal and vertical accountability. It requires that those subject to the conditions that structure their political agency are able to contest and co-determine those conditions. Where that requirement cannot be met — where the space of reasons is occupied, shaped or sealed off by systems that those subject to them cannot inspect, contest or influence — democratic legitimacy is not diminished or weakened. It is structurally precluded.
This normative framework identifies a condition that the preceding accounts have mapped but not fully resolved. Algorithmic systems occupy and shape the space of reasons within which citizens must be allowed to become political agents. The systems do this without being subject to the justificatory obligations that democratic legitimacy requires of any agent that exercises this kind of power. The obligation is not discharged by horizontal accountability mechanisms alone, by ombudsmen or courts. Such mechanisms operate at one remove from the individuals whose space of reasons is being structured. What Forst’s principle of justification requires is that individuals themselves have meaningful standing as normative authorities in relation to the systems that govern their political agency, that the architectural conditions of democratic life are themselves open to justificatory challenge by those subject to them.
Adding to Diamond and Morlino’s framework, this paper proposes a ninth dimension, designed to capture the gap created by algorithmic systems. It is not concerned with what individuals and groups do within democratic life, that is the domain of Diamond and Morlino’s existing eight dimensions. It is concerned with the conditions under which democratic life becomes possible in the first place. Where algorithmic systems occupy the space of reasons, shaping their world view, without being subject to the justificatory obligations that Forst’s principle requires, those conditions are structurally compromised. The existing dimensions remain capable of measuring democratic outputs. What they cannot measure, and what the ninth dimension addresses, is whether the architectural conditions that make those outputs democratically meaningful are themselves subject to the justificatory challenge that democratic legitimacy demands. That is the gap this paper identifies. That is the gap the ninth dimension is designed to close.