Call for Papers - Artificial Intelligence and Public Administration: Reimagining Governance in the Digital Age

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a set of transformative technologies within the emerging landscape of digital metamorphosis (Tangi et al., 2024). It promises to recalibrate the fundamental architectural mechanisms of public administrative systems with unprecedented computational sophistication and adaptive potential (Sun & Medaglia, 2019).

AI within the contemporary public sector ecosystems can be considered a challenge at which technological capabilities, ethical reflexivity, and administrative imaginaries engage in a continuous, recursive negotiation of institutional meaning and potential intersect (Guenduez & Mettler, 2023).

As policymakers become more sophisticated in using AI, they need to mitigate its structural biases and might even use it to address profound inequalities in resource distribution and the delivery of public services (Margetts, 2022; Wiley et al., 2024). 

The modern landscape of AI in public governance presents a significant interpretive challenge. Technological possibilities and academic interpretations are fundamentally fluid in this complex area, requiring thorough, multidimensional research methods that go beyond existing disciplinary limits (Mergel et al., 2024).

This special issue seeks to explore the multifaceted dimensions of AI integration within governmental systems, transcending technological implementation to critically examine algorithmic governance's socio-organizational implications (Bonomi Savignon et al., 2023; Wong et al., 2024), potential risks (Nzobonimpa & Savard, 2023), impacts on public value (Valle-Cruz et al., 2023), and the long-term balance of social welfare (Oravec, 2019). We, therefore, specifically seek submissions that address one of the following topics:

- Governance and Democratic Accountability - How do emergent governmental institutions strategically negotiate the complex epistemological interplay between technological efficiency and democratic legitimacy while critically interrogating the potential ontological reconfiguration of administrative accountability within algorithmically mediated governance ecosystems?
- Managerial Competency Transformation - What substantive professional prerequisites are needed for public management practitioners to navigate the increasingly sophisticated algorithmic decision-making landscapes where technological mediation fundamentally problematizes traditional bureaucratic expertise?
- Socio-Technological Relational Dynamics - How are the fundamental phenomenological relationships between citizen-state-enterprise configurations recursively transformed through the mediative technological infrastructures of AI?
- Systemic Transformational Implications - What are AI adoption’s long-term geopolitical, economic, and welfare implications for the multi-level systemic transformations across societal, institutional, and individual ecologies?
- Labor Dynamics - How do algorithmic technologies reconfigure organizational labor dynamics while critically examining the tension between human and technological augmentation?
Normative-Regulatory Architecture - What intricate normative and regulatory architectures are emerging across governmental domains to mediate AI implementation’s complex technological and ethical landscape?

Methodologically, we appreciate disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches and welcome empirical case studies, critical policy analysis, comparative international perspectives, and theoretical perspectives.

Key dates

Authors are asked to submit a full paper in Italian or English, complying with the journal's editorial guidelines (https://www.aziendapubblica.com/pagina/authors-guidelines-1796.html), by November 30th to aziendapubblica@economia.uniroma2.it. 

After peer review, the accepted papers are projected to be published in Azienda Pubblica volume 2, 2026 (spring/summer).