The Systems of Democracy: AI Governing Power and Reach Inside — Companion Key and Article

The reading key and written argument accompanying the diagram The Systems of Democracy: AI Governing Power and Reach Inside. It transcribes all nineteen mapped domains across the social, political and infrastructural dimensions in full, together with the two central inventories of governing capability and data access, and defines the distinction the diagram is built on: the power a system exercises over decisions is not the same as the access a system has to data about people, and the two require different governance instruments. Consent and minimisation govern reach; decision rights, contestability and the authority to halt govern power. It develops the feedback relation between the two as the source of compounding systemic effect, sets out the six named systemic risks with attention to infrastructure dependency and correlated cascade failure as the least reversible, and maps the six proposed responses — transparency, auditability, data sovereignty, decentralisation, human oversight, and constitutional guardrails — onto the mode each addresses. It closes by stating the limits of the map: it claims neither uniform deployment, nor harm in every domain, nor coordinating intent, and it deliberately declines to rank the cells. AI governance; democracy; governing power; data reach; algorithmic accountability; surveillance; predictive policing; credit scoring; systemic risk; cascade failure; data sovereignty; human oversight; constitutional guardrails