The Digital Welfare State and Distributive Politics in Emerging Democracies: Algorithmic Targeting, Policy Feedback, and Political Trust

Abstrak

This literature review examines how digitally mediated welfare architectures reshape distributive politics in emerging democracies, with particular attention to algorithmic targeting, biometric identification, automated eligibility, and social registries. Drawing on an interpretive synthesis of 12 peer-reviewed journal articles, the study addresses two questions: how the digital welfare state is conceptualized in the literature, and through what mechanisms its core instruments influence political trust, legitimacy, accountability, and state-citizen relations. The review finds that the digital welfare state is most often conceptualized as an administrative and technological architecture grounded in bureaucratic modernization, data-driven governance, digital social protection infrastructure, and reconfigured state-citizen interfaces. Across the studies, the most recurrent instruments are automated decision-making systems, targeting and classification tools, biometric and digital identification, digital self-service platforms, and payment or verification infrastructures. The findings further show that the political effects of welfare digitalization are mediated through classification, inclusion and exclusion, administrative burden, opacity, grievance access, and policy feedback. Rather than producing uniformly positive or negative outcomes, digital welfare generates uneven consequences that depend on institutional design, procedural fairness, transparency, grievance capacity, and state capacity. The review concludes that digital welfare should be understood not merely as an administrative reform, but as a political-institutional arrangement with significant distributive consequences.