Abstract :
This article theorizes artificial intelligence as a power-bearing political infrastructure that re-configures authority, legitimacy, representation, and strategic order across contemporary polities. Rather than treating AI as a neutral efficiency technology, the article frames it as an institutionalized regime of probabilistic inference, classification, and attention allocation that redistributes infrastructural power toward actors with asymmetric access to data, compute, expertise, and distribution channels. It develops a political science analytic architecture that integrates three-dimensional power, non-domination, principal-agent delegation, historical institutionalism pathways of layering and drift, and political behavior constructs such as bounded rationality, motivated cognition, and affective polarization. Within democratic arenas, AI-mediated micro-segmentation and ranking logics are analyzed as mechanisms of agenda control and information discrimination that weaken shared publicity, dilute accountability, and shift influence from contestable persuasion toward manipulative optimization. Within the administrative state, algorithmic governance is treated as a transformation of discretion, where authority migrates upstream into objective-setting, proxy construction, threshold calibration, and lifecycle updating, generating contestability deficits, administrative burdens, and accountability gaps intensified by procurement lock-in and proprietary enclosure. At the international level, the article conceptualizes AI as strategic infrastructure embedded in supply-chain dependencies and regime complexity, producing security dilemma dynamics, epistemic fragility in crisis decision cycles, and scalable information operations that target cognitive security and institutional trust. The synthesis yields a compact typology of political effects and governance risks, and articulates institutional design principles for democratic steering that prioritize procedural intelligibility, auditability, enforceable remedy pathways, and rights-consistent constraints on surveillance and targeting. The article offers a cross-sector, globally oriented conceptual toolkit for academics, policymakers, industry actors, and students navigating algorithmic polities under conditions of accelerated, transnational, datafied power.

Keywords :
Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Governance, Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, Disinformation, Electoral Integrity, Micro-targeting, Political Polarization, Surveillance, Digital Authoritarianism, Democratic Backsliding, Platform Governance, Data Privacy, International Security.

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