Governing the Perceptual Infrastructure : Public Administration in the Age of Algorithmic Perception
Artificial intelligence systems increasingly shape not only what information citizens access but the interpretive frameworks through which they perceive public affairs, posing a governance challenge that public administration scholarship has yet to theorise. Through conceptual and normative analysis, the paper develops the construct of perceptual infrastructure – the cognitive and informational substrate of democratic deliberation – drawing on information theory, public administration and regulatory-governance scholarship, and tests it against the EU regulatory architecture. The analysis shows that the algorithmic construction of perceptual frameworks constitutes a distinct governance domain that the EU AI Act and the Digital Services Act do not reach, owing primarily to a regulatory omission rather than an implementation deficit: existing provisions take systems, use cases and identifiable harms as their object, not the cumulative, longitudinal construction of perception. An accountability framework is proposed – incorporating aggregate transparency, perceptual sovereignty as a citizen right, proportional responsibility and meta-perceptual literacy – with concrete implications for administrative accountability, regulatory capacity and democratic resilience.