Digital De-Bureaucratization: Technology, Populism, and the Moral Politics of the State

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Meaning-making: morals, ethics, and affect

Abstract

When sociologists look back at the first quarter of the twenty-first century, two transformations will stand out: the global expansion of digital infrastructures and the rise of right-wing populism alongside challenges to liberal-democratic rule of law. This paper asks how these forces intersect. How do digital technologies reshape the bureaucratic-legal foundations and procedural logics of democratic governance?

Intervening in classic theories of rational-legal authority (Weber 1922) and scholarship on bureaucracy and lived experience (Lipsky 1980; Dubois 1999; Wacquant 2009; Lamont 2016; Fassin 2015), the paper mobilizes Science and Technology Studies frameworks on co-production, expertise, and classification (Jasanoff 2004; Epstein 1995; Bowker and Star 1999) to theorize the emergence of the digital state. I describe how technological systems stabilize because of a politics of morally delegitimating bureaucratic mediation while reconstituting sovereign power in new forms.

The argument draws on ethnographic research with street vendors in urban India amid the rollout of Digital India, centered on biometric identification (Aadhaar) and real-time payments (Unified Payments Interface). Digitization is widely narrated—as political leaders, technology entrepreneurs, and vendors themselves frame it—as a way to bypass corrupt local bureaucrats and enable direct inclusion in markets and welfare. Vendors, who routinely face harassment from municipal officials, imagine political leaders as virtuous and corrective. Digital governance thus furnishes a moral critique of street-level bureaucracy and promises unmediated access between citizen and sovereign.

Rather than hollowing out the state, digitization recentralizes authority and personifies it: welfare becomes a gift from political leaders rather than an impersonal bureaucratic entitlement. This explains durable uptake despite failures on the ground. Comparative reflections on the US show similar dynamics. Populist regimes attack federal bureaucracy and instantiate technologically mediated governance (DOGE), recasting mediation itself as a democratic threat. Digital de-bureaucratization, therefore, reshapes both administrative procedure and the moral politics of democracy globally.

Author

• Pariroo Rattan, Northwestern University