Working Paper
Stage 3 identified a shared structural limit running across Diamond and Morlino’s dimensions. Three dimensions were used to demonstrate the reach and character of algorithmic impact. Participation cannot determine whether engagement is independently constituted. Responsiveness cannot distinguish between formed and pre-formed preferences. Rule of law becomes closed to democratic scrutiny. These are not failures of the dimensions. They mark the limit of the framework’s reach. This reveals the absence of a dimension capable of addressing the conditions that all eight presuppose: the prior architectural environment within which individuals become political agents before measurable democratic activity begins. Stage 4 defines the proposed ninth dimension, establishes its normative foundation, specifies the minimum standard it applies and situates it within the accountability architecture Diamond and Morlino’s framework provides.
The proposed ninth dimension is Algorithmic Accountability. It is concerned with the extent to which the systems that position individuals as political agents are themselves answerable to those they govern. Unlike the original eight dimensions, Algorithmic Accountability does not measure what individuals and groups do within democratic life: that remains the scope of the 2004 framework’s normative architecture. It addresses the conditions under which democratic life becomes possible in the first place.
The distinction between these two levels is not simply analytical. Diamond and Morlino’s eight dimensions, taken together, function as a normative architecture designed to keep the space of reasons open. Fair elections, rule of law, participation, responsiveness, horizontal and vertical accountability: each operates as a structural guarantee against the kind of pre-agency closure that would undermine democratic legitimacy. In 2004, that architecture was sufficient because the means of exercising constitutive power over the space of reasons at scale did not exist outside the reach of those dimensions. Any actor capable of closing off the conditions of political agency would have had to operate through the phenomenal surface of democratic life to do so, and, in doing so, would have become visible to the framework’s measures. The framework does not guarantee against such closure, as the cases examined across this investigation confirm, but it provides an identifiable and, potentially, judicially accountable focus for democratic challenge.
Consider a thought experiment. In 2004, as in 2026, the conditions for democratic collapse existed. A political actor, ‘General Jones’, manages to secure elected office. Once in power, he dismantles horizontal accountability bodies, packs the senior judiciary with compliant appointments, closes media outlets hostile to his administration and repeals legislative protections for minorities. Every action General Jones takes is normatively legible within Diamond and Morlino’s framework. The disbanding of accountability institutions registers against the accountability dimension. Judicial capture registers against rule of law. Media closure registers against freedom. The repeal of minority protections registers against equality. The framework catches all of it, because General Jones, however authoritarian his intentions, must operate through the phenomenal surface of democratic life. His actions are visible, attributable and leave measurable traces across the eight dimensions. He can be identified, named and made the potentially judicially accountable focus of democratic challenge. All of this would feature in registers such as V-Dem, which tracks precisely these dimensions of democratic quality across the full range of observable institutional behaviour (Nord et al., 2026).
What General Jones is doing, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s terms, is “capturing the referees”: targeting the judicial system, law enforcement bodies and regulatory agencies whose function is to serve as neutral arbiters of the democratic process (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018, p. 79). Alberto Fujimori’s presidency in Peru illustrates the pattern with particular clarity. Elected democratically in 1990, Fujimori progressively dismantled the institutional architecture around him, dissolving Congress and the constitution in 1992, packing the courts with loyalists and using intelligence services to surveil and blackmail political opponents. Each step was formally legal or presented as an emergency measure. Each left a measurable trace across the dimensions of democratic quality. Each had an identifiable author. The referees were captured and the capture was measurable (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018, ch. 4).
Donald Trump’s second term provides a contemporary illustration of the same dynamic operating within a mature democracy, subject to the 2004 dimensions but also impacted by algorithmic distortion. Since his inauguration, the administration has systematically dismantled horizontal accountability structures across multiple dimensions simultaneously. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dismantled federal oversight bodies and purged inspectors general across nineteen positions (Nord et al., 2026, p. 35). Executive orders targeted specific law firms whose lawyers had pursued cases against the administration, directly threatening the independence of the legal profession (Trump, 2025). The administration repeatedly defied court orders and publicly intimidated judges. Freedom of expression in the United States, on V-Dem’s measure, fell to its lowest level since the end of the Second World War. The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 characterises Trump’s second term as “a rapid and aggressive concentration of power in the presidency” (Nord et al., 2026, p. 1) that has undercut institutionalised checks and balances, politicised the civil service and intimidated the judiciary, recording the largest single-year drop in American democratic standing in the entire history of their dataset (Nord et al., 2026, p. 20). All of these actions are normatively legible within Diamond and Morlino’s framework. The actors are identifiable, mechanisms are constitutionally visible and the democratic consequences are measurable. General Jones, in his contemporary form, is captured by the eight dimensions.
Now run the same thought experiment with algorithmic systems doing equivalent work. The space of reasons is constituted before political agency forms. Preferences are architecturally designed before citizens enter any accountability process. The judiciary cannot reach the level at which power is being exercised, as Thompson and Carlo confirms (R (Thompson and Carlo) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2026] EWHC 915 (Admin), para 229). Minorities are disproportionately flagged by algorithms and media plurality rules do not apply. Here, there is no General Jones undermining democracy. There is, in its place, a lack of agency. Nevertheless, there is a documented pattern of conditioning that shapes the political environment within which General Jones becomes possible. Huszár et al.’s finding that the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left across six of seven countries studied, confirmed by Twitter’s own research team, identifies a structural tendency built into platform architecture before any individual actor exploits it (Huszár et al., 2022, p. 1). Ye, Luceri and Ferrara’s audit of X’s recommendation system during the 2024 US Presidential Election found that neutral new accounts show a default right-leaning bias in content exposure, with both left and right-leaning accounts encountering amplified exposure to content aligned with their existing political stance (Ye, Luceri and Ferrara, 2025, pp. 1, 5).1 The architecture did not create Trump. It constituted and sustained the conditions within which the preferences, beliefs and political demands that brought him to power were formed, normalised and insulated from counter-deliberation before any institutional accountability mechanism had occasion to engage. Once in power and backed by a participatory mandate, General Jones begins the deconstruction of democracy. What distinguishes the contemporary version is not the intent but the architecture: algorithmic mechanisms that amplify, accelerate and conceal what previous autocrats could only attempt through visible institutional force. The eight dimensions are still measuring the consequences. However, they have no mechanism for assessing the architectural conditions that shaped and continue to shape the preferences and beliefs that brought him there, or that continue to insulate his political support from the reflective challenge democratic deliberation requires.
The framework has not failed here. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. What it was not designed to do, because in 2004 no agent possessed the capacity, was govern the architectural conditions that precede its own operation. The threat of pre-agency closure was latent in 2004. The eight dimensions were normatively sufficient for that environment because the technical capacity to exercise constitutive power over the space of reasons at democratic scale did not yet exist outside their reach. Any actor seeking to achieve such closure would have had to pass through the phenomenal surface of democratic life to do so, becoming visible to the framework’s measures in the process. What has changed is not the normative logic of the framework. It is the emergence of systems capable of exercising constitutive power over the space of reasons at a level the eight dimensions were never designed to reach. The ninth dimension addresses that gap. It provides the link between the original normative requirements of the 2004 framework and the architectural conditions of 2026 political life: the level of analysis at which the preconditions of the other eight dimensions can themselves be examined and, where necessary, contested.
Forst’s principle of justification requires that any agent exercising constitutive power over persons as justificatory beings must answer to those it governs (Forst, 2024, p. 2). Diamond and Morlino do not describe their framework in noumenal terms, but their account of democratic quality already depends on conditions that are noumenal in structure: conditions that shape the space within which citizens can appear as equal political agents and justificatory beings. Their dimensions are not merely a catalogue of visible institutional outputs; they presuppose a deeper normative order in which equality, agency and contestability must already be secured if democracy is to function at all. The ninth dimension makes that implicit level explicit. It names the architectural conditions under which justificatory claims can be formed, directed and received, and it does so because the existing dimensions only make sense if those background conditions are in place.
My noumenal claim requires demonstration through application. Consider three of Diamond and Morlino’s dimensions directly. The equality dimension measures whether citizens are treated equally under the law and whether equal political rights are formally protected. For equality to function as a democratic measure rather than a simply procedural one, it must presuppose that those who are formally equal are also equal as normative authorities. Their claims carry the same justificatory standing and the political order is answerable to them on equal terms. This is not a contingent addition to the equality dimension. It is what makes equality democratically significant rather than administratively convenient. The participation dimension measures the capacity of citizens to engage in democratic life: to vote, organise, petition and make demands of power. For participation to function as a measure of democratic quality rather than mere activity, it’s anchor point is that citizens are genuine agents whose engagement reflects independently formed judgements rather than structurally pre-determined outputs. Without agentive capacity, participation is performance rather than practice. In this case, the dimension has nothing meaningful to measure. The accountability dimension, which Diamond and Morlino identify as requiring citizens to hold governments responsible for their decisions, presupposes that citizens can form coherent demands, direct them toward an identifiable addressee and receive a substantive response. That is a reason-giving relationship in the precise sense Forst identifies: a structured exchange in which one party exercises power and is obligated to justify that exercise to those subject to it. None of these presuppositions are Forstian by name. They are Forstian in structure. Each identifies a condition of justificatory agency, equal standing, agentive capacity and reason-giving addressability, without which the dimension in question ceases to measure democratic quality and measures only observable behaviour. Forst does not supply these presuppositions to Diamond and Morlino from outside. He names what was already structurally required for their framework to do the normative work it was designed to do.
Specifying that obligation in practical terms requires a choice between what Williams distinguishes as thick and thin normative standards (Williams, 2006, pp. 140–142). A fully thick standard would require that every architectural decision be open to justificatory challenge and co-determined by those subject to it. Such a standard is neither operationally achievable nor analytically useful as a dimensional measure. It would be impossible to determine when it had been met, and it risks collapsing into an indeterminate ideal that generates no measurable criteria for comparative assessment. The ninth dimension operates instead with a deliberately thin normative standard. This would provide a transferable framework suited to governance and legal structures globally rather than specific to one region.
Thin, in this context, does not mean weak. A thin democracy is one that retains the minimum features and structures necessary before it ceases to be democratic at all. The equality and agency presuppositions embedded in Diamond and Morlino’s dimensions provide the guidelines for what a thin standard requires. Equality, in its thin sense, does not mean that all citizens receive identical treatment or identical outcomes. It means that all citizens possess the basic status of persons whose justificatory claims must be capable of being made and received. This is a precondition that must be in place before and regardless of whether any claims are made. Agency, in its thin sense, does not mean that all citizens exercise identical degrees of political influence, clearly they do not. It means that all citizens possess the structural conditions necessary to form, direct and contest political claims as genuine normative authorities. This too is a requirement regardless of whether any or all citizens choose to exercise their agency. Where citizens make competing claims, democracy’s function is to adjudicate between them. Regardless of outcomes, there is an assumption that the justification for successful and unsuccessful claims is traceable and examinable under a democratic lens.
The thin standard therefore specifies only what must be in place before either of these conditions can function at all. It leaves open the further and contested question of what full democratic equality or full democratic agency would look like. That question is not resolved here. It is, however, made askable for the first time by the ninth dimension. For the purposes of this dimension, the thin standard is defined by three requirements. Each is derived from Forst’s principle of justification and from the structural conditions identified across Stages 1 to 3. Together they provide the basis for empirical operationalisation without prescribing a particular vision of platform governance.
The first requirement is architectural transparency. For justificatory agency to be possible at even its thinnest level, individuals — citizens, civil servants, judiciary — must be able to identify the governing logic of the systems that shape their political environment with sufficient clarity to contest it. This does not require full algorithmic disclosure. At the thick end this would lead into overly complex, technical accounts beyond the grasp of most. This isn’t an issue. Just as we might interact with our local MPs, in the UK, and encourage them to table a motion because we have a concern, it does not require or need our MPs to explain the processes involved. Brauneis and Goodman’s study of algorithmic transparency in the US public sector provides a wide ranging account of what this requires and why it so frequently fails. Filing 42 open records requests across 23 US states for information on six predictive algorithmic systems, they found that in almost every case meaningful algorithmic transparency was not provided (Brauneis and Goodman, 2018, pp. 103, 151–152). Their concept of meaningful transparency is precise and directly applicable here: not source code disclosure, which they argue is rarely necessary, but knowledge sufficient to evaluate the utility and fairness of the system, and to understand what policy judgments the algorithm embodies (Brauneis and Goodman, 2018, p. 132). The failure to provide even this minimum is problematic in the public sector. Democratic governments bear duties of accountability and, because the risk of algorithmic opacity is not merely epistemic but political, it creates the conditions for what they term “corporate capture of public power”, where private vendors make design and policy choices out of the sight of client agencies, the public, or both (Brauneis and Goodman, 2018, p. 109). Engelmann reinforces this from a constitutional perspective, arguing that algorithmic transparency is not simply a governance requirement but a fundamental right in the democratic rule of law, derived from the constitutional principles of due process and accountability: “the possibility of overseeing activities conducted by the State, an intrinsic element of democracy itself” (Engelmann, 2023, p. 173). Toledo’s review of 78 publications reinforces that the structural problem Brauneis and Goodman identified in 2018 remains: algorithmic systems continue to operate as opaque computational black boxes whose internal decision logic is difficult to interpret, creating persistent challenges for transparency and oversight because citizens, policymakers and auditors cannot determine how automated systems reach specific decisions (Toledo, 2026, p. 3). The formal equality of citizens as political agents is unchanged at the phenomenal surface while being hollowed out at the architectural level. The competing claims that democracy is designed to adjudicate cannot reach the justificatory level at which they are being pre-structured. Without transparency of sufficient depth, the first condition of the thin standard cannot be met.
The second requirement is justificatory addressability. When a system shapes the conditions of political agency, there must be somewhere to direct a challenge. Not a complaints form or a regulatory body acting on a citizen’s behalf, but a genuine relationship of accountability between the system and those it governs: an identifiable person or body in authority capable of receiving and responding to justificatory claims. Hillo, Vento and Erkkilä’s experimental evidence, drawn from randomised survey experiments involving 842 senior public administrators and 3,245 citizens in Finland, provides empirical grounding for this requirement. Their central finding is that both transparency and human discretion enhance perceived legitimacy of automated decision-making, but that incongruence between citizen preferences and administrative practice signals a misalignment that purely technical transparency cannot resolve (Hillo et al., 2025, p. 1). The democratic implication is stated directly in their study: governing by AI ought also to be responsive to the view of citizens, whose support democratic governing ultimately rests on (Hillo et al., 2025, p. 1). Legitimacy requires not only that citizens can see how decisions are made but that those decisions remain responsive to the citizens who are governed by them. Hillo et al. find that public administrators show a stronger positive response than citizens to both the disclosure of algorithmic processes and to decision-making frameworks that include a human in the final decision (Hillo et al., 2025, p. 10). The asymmetry matters: the addressability gap is deeper for citizens than institutional actors, confirming that the gap cannot be closed by governance arrangements designed primarily around administrative rather than citizen-facing accountability. In this respect, there is a mirror of non-digital addressability. Where there is challenge and no response, trust is eroded. Communication with digital systems is no different, except that those previously working in the non-digital justificatory relationship are removed, with interactions pushed to higher tiers of administration. Toledo confirms that this addressability gap is structural rather than incidental. In traditional administrative systems, decisions are made by identifiable public officials who can be held accountable for their actions. When algorithmic systems influence those decisions, it becomes more difficult to understand how outcomes are produced and the chain of accountability that democratic legitimacy requires is correspondingly weakened (Toledo, 2026, p. 2). Institutional proxies can supplement but cannot substitute for this relationship. An ombudsman acting on the individual’s behalf, for example, represents what Diamond and Morlino describe as horizontal accountability: institutional oversight operating at one remove from the individual whose space of reasons is being structured (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, p. 25). This agent is necessary. However, they do not, on their own, discharge the obligation that constitutive power generates. The justification for decisions shaping political agency must be traceable and examinable under a democratic lens. Without a genuine addressee, there is no traceability. Without justificatory addressability, the second condition of the thin standard cannot be met.
The third requirement is minimal co-authorship. If transparency provides a means of determining how a system works and addressability provides somewhere to direct a challenge, co-authorship asks a prior question: do agents have any recognised standing in shaping the conditions of the system itself? Democratic legitimacy, working with Forst, requires that those subject to a normative order are able in some meaningful sense to participate in determining its basic conditions (Forst, 2024, p. 187). This is not a requirement for collective design of every parameter or architectural choice. It is a demand that the architecture governing democratic agency is not constituted entirely without reference to those it governs.
Toledo’s systematic review identifies five key governance dimensions in the literature on algorithmic accountability in public administration: transparency, explainability, human oversight and administrative responsibility, ethical governance and public trust (Toledo, 2026, pp. 16–17). These dimensions provide a measurable framework that could, in principle, function as a rubric for the ninth dimension in much the same way that V-Dem measures participation: the greater the number of features present and functioning, the stronger the case that the architectural conditions of democratic agency are being met. The research agenda this implies is developed in Stage 7. What Toledo’s review also confirms, however, is that existing governance frameworks extend traditional accountability mechanisms to algorithmic systems without yet engaging the prior question of whether citizens have any structural role in constituting the conditions under which those systems operate. The frameworks reviewed address accountability at the level of institutional governance, without resolving how citizens, as agents in the democratic system, can participate in determining the basic conditions of algorithmic governance itself (Toledo, 2026, p. 24). Hillo et al.’s finding that incongruence between citizen preferences and administrative practice represents a misalignment that technical transparency by itself cannot resolve aligns with Toledo: the legitimacy deficit is not one of information alone but of structural participation (Hillo et al., 2025, p. 1). Both studies confirm the same absence. The existing literature knows what governance mechanisms are needed at the institutional level. It has not yet resolved the prior question of citizen standing in relation to the systems that govern them.
The minimum threshold the co-authorship condition sets is thin. It asks only whether citizens have any recognised standing in the processes through which the governing logic of participation is determined, revised or contested. A democracy adjudicating between competing claims presupposes that those making the claims have had some role in constituting the conditions under which their claims can be made. Where that condition is absent, the adjudication is not democratic, however procedurally correct its form. The 300,000 citizens who petitioned against the Palantir contracts in April 2026 illustrate the condition precisely (38 Degrees, 2026a; 38 Degrees, 2026b). They had standing to petition Parliament. They had no standing in relation to the systems themselves: no recognised claim against the architecture, no institutional channel through which a demand for justification could be addressed to those exercising constitutive power over the conditions of their democratic life. Counting, in Dean’s sense, without being heard (Dean, 2005, p. 61). Without minimal co-authorship, the third condition of the thin standard cannot be met.2
Taken together, the three requirements specify the minimum structural conditions without which the basic statuses of equality and agency that Diamond and Morlino’s framework presupposes cannot function at the architectural level. In the contemporary landscape of 2026, these architectural prerequisites remain systematically absent from both commercial platforms and public administrative systems. In 2026, across both commercial platform environments and the algorithmic systems through which public authorities exercise power over citizens, all three remain systematically absent or significantly underdeveloped. Toledo’s review of 78 publications confirms this: existing governance frameworks have extended traditional accountability mechanisms to algorithmic systems without yet integrating the structural conditions necessary for citizens to participate in constituting the governance of those systems themselves (Toledo, 2026, p. 24).
Placing the ninth dimension within Diamond and Morlino’s framework requires further investigation of accountability and the distinction between vertical and horizontal. Diamond and Morlino define accountability as the obligation of elected political leaders to answer for their political decisions when asked by voters, vertical, or constitutional, horizontal, bodies (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, p. 25). Vertical accountability describes the structured relationship through which citizens hold those who exercise power over them directly to account, operating through electoral and non-electoral channels. Horizontal accountability describes the system of institutional checks through which state actors are held accountable by other state actors: courts, legislatures, ombudsmen and oversight bodies.
Platforms exercise a form of power that falls within vertical accountability. They go beyond influencing beliefs or preferences. Rather, they determine the conditions under which individuals become political agents. This is qualitatively different from the influence of traditional media. A newspaper shapes the informational environment. A platform shapes the justificatory conditions within which that information is formed, encountered, assessed and acted upon. The distinction is not one of scale or pervasiveness in the same way that a niche or universal publication is a matter of scale or pervasiveness. It is one of structural function. Where a medium carries political communication, a platform constitutes the conditions of political communication, actively altering the character of public communication itself rather than simply transmitting it (Habermas, 2022, p. 159). This constitutive role is what places platforms within the category of actors toward whom vertical accountability obligations run. This argument rests on recognising that the form of power platforms exercise, constitutive power over persons as political agents at scale, generates an obligation of justification regardless of the institutional form through which it is exercised. 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), while Gowder confirms that platforms carry out tasks that are meaningfully similar, in both their social role and the constraints they face, to tasks carried out by states (Gowder, 2023, p. 43). Both frameworks were developed in Stage 2. The Forstian argument does not require that platforms be classified as sovereign actors. It requires only that any actor exercising constitutive power over the space of reasons owes justification to those subject to it. Platforms exercise this, the obligation of justification follows directly from that exercise of power.
We have an imbalance. Platforms exercise constitutive power over individuals as political agents. That power creates a vertical obligation of justification. What exists, however, is largely horizontal: state institutions oversee platforms, courts adjudicate disputes and regulators enforce compliance standards. The gap between the obligation that exists and the accountability mechanisms available to discharge it is not a matter of regulatory ambition or political will. It is structural. Horizontal accountability operates at one remove from the individuals whose space of reasons is being structured. It addresses the platform as a regulated entity with compliance obligations rather than as a constitutive authority with justificatory obligations to those it governs. The problem is compounded by a second dimension of horizontal infiltration. Horizontal accountability is not only insufficient in relation to platforms, it is subject to the same architectural conditions it is designed to govern. The DWP, the MoD and police forces are horizontal accountability actors whose own operations are governed by algorithmic systems they cannot fully scrutinise, as Stages 1 and 3 of this investigation document. The TAG register identifies 55 active algorithmic systems across UK public administration, the majority operating with limited transparency (Public Law Project, 2024). Courts applying judicial review are restricted to procedural compliance rather than architectural scrutiny, as Thompson and Carlo confirms (R (Thompson and Carlo) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2026] EWHC 915 (Admin), para 5). In significant respects, architectures have already moved inside the institutions that horizontal accountability relies upon to function.
The European Commission’s enforcement programme, under the Digital Services Act, illustrates both the growing reach and the persistent structural limitation of horizontal mechanisms. Since formal proceedings were opened against TikTok in February 2024 (European Commission, 2024), the Commission has moved through advertising transparency, researcher access and, in February 2026, addictive design (European Commission, 2026). The February 2026 preliminary findings are the most architecturally significant yet: for the first time, enforcement action is directed not at what the platform distributes, its outputs, but at how its design shapes user behaviour, specifically the rabbit hole effect of its recommender systems, infinite scroll, autoplay and push notifications. This represents a meaningful step toward the architectural level. The Commission has recognised that design choices, not only content decisions, carry democratic and social consequences sufficient to attract regulatory intervention. What the February 2026 findings do not yet address is the justificatory standing of individuals in relation to those design choices. Addictive design is engaged as a risk to individual wellbeing, particularly for minors and vulnerable users. The prior question, whether the architecture shaping the conditions of political agency requires justification to those it constitutes as citizens, remains outside the frame. The normative gap this paper identifies is not closed by the February 2026 findings. It is, however, brought into closer proximity to regulatory visibility than at any previous point in the DSA enforcement arc.3
The ninth dimension can now be stated in its final form. Algorithmic Accountability measures the degree to which the systems that constitute individuals as political agents are subject to the justificatory obligations those individuals are owed. It operates at the level of the preconditions of democratic agency: the architectural conditions within which political preferences are formed, through which political claims are made and by which the state’s exercise of power over citizens is increasingly mediated. It does not replace the existing eight dimensions. What this new dimension provides is the level of analysis at which their shared presupposition, a background environment within which democratic activity takes place, can itself become an object of democratic assessment.
The normative foundation of the dimension rests on Forst’s principle of justification, grounded in the conditions of non-domination rather than in a prior metaphysical account of persons. Any agent exercising constitutive power over the space of reasons within which political agency is formed owes justification to those it governs. Platforms, and the algorithmic systems through which public authorities increasingly exercise power over citizens, occupy precisely this position. The obligation they generate cannot be discharged by horizontal accountability mechanisms alone, however sophisticated those mechanisms become. What is required is a form of vertical justificatory accountability that connects those subject to algorithmic systems directly to those who govern them.
The dimension is assessed against a thin normative standard defined by three minimum requirements: architectural transparency sufficient for principled challenge, justificatory addressability providing a genuine locus of accountability and minimal co-authorship ensuring a structural role for individuals in the governance of the conditions of their participation. These requirements are deliberately minimal. They specify only what must be in place before the basic statuses of equality and agency that Diamond and Morlino’s framework presupposes can function at the architectural level. They are, however, conditions that do not exist. In 2026, commercial platform environments and the algorithmic systems through which public authorities exercise power over citizens, all three remain systematically absent or significantly underdeveloped.
The gap the ninth dimension addresses is not an empirical gap within the existing dimensions. It is a structural gap prior to them. Closing it does not require revising the framework’s normative commitments, which remain as analytically powerful and empirically measurable as they were in 2004. It requires adding a dimension capable of assessing the conditions that make those commitments realisable in an environment that the original framework was not designed to govern. General Jones in 2004 and 2026 is catchable. The architecture that produces the conditions for General Jones is not, at least not yet, and not without the ninth dimension. That is what Algorithmic Accountability provides: the level of analysis at which the preconditions of democratic life can themselves be examined, contested and held to account.