Digital Policy Design: from Principles to Practices

Contemporary politics is undergoing a structural transformation in which technological development is giving rise to a new art of governance, whose underlying choices will reshape the form of the State. Within Digital Statecraft (Engin et al., 2025), a new configuration of power sees corporate actors (transnational companies, AI and chip providers) increasingly mediating access to information, shaping public discourse, and conditioning policy outcomes. From this perspective, Digital Policy (DP), as a building block of public power, must be investigated in order to observe how decision-making drifts away from the visible arenas of democratic institutions and migrates into the opaque domains of algorithmic computation and automated moderation, redefining political relations, through which instruments authority is exercised, and according to what rules collective decisions acquire legitimacy. Digicracy (Calise and Musella, 2026) captures the reconfiguration of public authority once these dynamics become embedded in the constitutive infrastructure of the State.