Algorithmic governance and surveillance federalism: transforming the digital state in India and ASEAN

Abstract

Introduction:

The current paper suggests the conceptualisation of surveillance federalism as the theoretical framework to interrogate the recomposition of local and regional democratic autonomy in the context of multi-level governance in the second stage of digital centralisation. Using a comparative method that compares India with a chosen group of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states, that is, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, this paper discusses the hostile relationship between technologically modernising statehood and strong democracy. However, these centrally controlled digital architectures, exemplified by biometric identity regimes and algorithmic governance platforms, radically transform the federal bargain, as the manuscript argues. Although these systems are said to improve the efficiency of the provision of public services, they also erode the sovereignty of the sub-national governments replacing the consent-based shared sovereignty with technologically mediated centralised controls.

Methods:

Using a qualitative comparative design, this study compares India’s centralised coordination model with three distinct ASEAN trajectories such as Singapore’s technocratic model, Indonesia’s decentralised but increasingly Jakarta-centric framework, and the Philippines’ environment of localised experimentation and divided democratic capacity. Data is drawn from document analysis of national digital strategies and institutional capacity reports.

Results:

The paper outlines three interlocking processes at work in surveillance federalism: (1) centralisation of data at the expense of local democratic institutions; (2) the emergence of technocratic public administration, replacing deliberative politics with computational rationality; and (3) the algorithmic paradigm of citizens as data. A case study of the Aadhaar system in India and the Digital India programme that has been compiled shows how these centralised platforms are gradually de-democratising Panchayati Raj institutions and local autonomy in municipalities. Southeast Asian popular case studies that seek to explain the difference in digital mono-centralisation tend to take simplistic approaches to the analysis of different digital trajectories. An example of a high-capacity technocratic model with little democratic accountability is the Smart Nation programme in Singapore. Conversely, post-Reformasi decentralisation in Indonesia has triggered a new generation of Jakarta-centric surveillance, and in the Philippines, we can see an illustration of the multiplied impact of surveillance technologies in a divided democratic environment on local governmental capacity. Collectively, these instances illustrate how different forms of surveillance federalism burst forth in different regimes with different institutional outcomes.

Discussion:

The findings suggests that the democratic theory suggests that digital surveillance is a qualitatively new danger to federal democracy, which functions by creating institutional changes that are unobtrusive and do not involve a constitutional change. The theoretical breakthrough is the theorisation of surveillance federalism as a reconfigurative process of intergovernmental relations, citizen-state relations, and democratic accountability. The results dispute techno-optimistic accounts of digital governance and shed light on a way forward to democratic resilience, including the concept of data sovereignty, increased transparency, and strengthening local institutions. The policy implications are not limited to the cases presented, but they provide valuable lessons to democratic federations that face the demands of digitised concentration.

Introduction: digital democracy and the governance of algorithms

Digital paradox: authoritarian technology as democratic technology

The twenty-first century poses a definitional challenge to democratic states: all technologies that are positioned as facilitators of citizen participation, governmental transparency, and effective service delivery are also tools of state domination (Dahlberg, 2011). This is the paradox of modern discussions on the future of democracy, in which the prospect of technological empowerment is confronted by the fact of digital surveillance and administrative centralisation (Van Dijk, 2012). Digital authoritarianism, or the use of digital technologies to impose social control, repression, and governance over populations, has changed the political landscape, producing gargantuan vulnerabilities to open societies that go beyond conventional authoritarianism (Muldoon, 2025; Tseng et al., 2024). This is particularly so in centralised and federal systems, in which the dialectic between a central vista and local autonomy has historically led to democratic stability (Sánchez-Huertas and Garbiras, 2023). Although digitalisation is supposed to streamline public services, it also restructures the complex relationship between national and sub-national actors with an inherent centralising logic (Helbing et al., 2023). The dilemma facing federal democracies around the globe is therefore to find the best compromise that ensures sub-national self-governance and still ensures high levels of direct citizen control in the face of the centralising, homogenising and hierarchical nature of the modern governmental system (Moore, 2024).

Track-enabling federalism: a new sense-making paradigm

The article argues that surveillance federalism is a substantive theoretical approach to the study of the evolving nature of federal democracy in the circumstances of new centralised digital infrastructures (Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2023). Instead of using the interpretive prisms that are typically used to examine digital centralisation, which revolve around the well-known trade-offs between efficiency and privacy, this framework questions the systemic political realignments that digital centralisation brings about (Congge et al., 2023). It claims that digital platforms are not neutral administrative instruments but channels that implement a logic of centralisation and hierarchical control that, by definition, is incompatible with the pluralist and multi-level character of federal democratic governance. Surveillance federalism is defined by three interlocking mechanisms that make it different to traditional intergovernmental relations. First, the centralisation of data allows nation-states to bypass the current federal bargaining arrangements, creating new information channels to local communities and consolidating state authority (Ivars-Baidal et al., 2023a). Second, the paradigm relies on technocratic governance that silences political debate by optimising algorithms, which depict contentious policy decisions as technical issues solved by experts and machines (Silva et al., 2018). Third, algorithmic management redefines the citizen-state relationship as an algorithmic connexion between citizens-as-data subjects and their needs, which are processed and handled by algorithmic means (Ivars-Baidal et al., 2023b).

The India-ASEAN mirror: shining light on the weaknesses in democracies

The study, based on a theoretically informed comparative analysis that incorporates India, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, challenges traditional conceptions of surveillance federalism (Herath and Mittal, 2022). The comparative approach focuses on sharp differences between countries with different regime types, constitutional designs, and developmental contexts. India, being the biggest federal democracy, is a priceless case study to observe a country that is leading the digital transformation with flagship initiatives like Aadhaar and Digital India (Chen et al., 2024). Since India has a constitutionally guaranteed dedication to local self-government in the form of Panchayati Raj institutions, it provides an empirical laboratory to assess sub-national autonomy against digital centralisation (Zhu et al., 2022). The Smart Nation project in Singapore is a perfect example of a high-capacity technocratic government that functions in a unitary state, where efficiency overrides democratic accountability (Syed et al., 2021). Located in the framework of post-Suharto politics of decentralisation and ethno-religious pluralism, the digital development in Indonesia is characterised by the conflicts between national perspectives of digital power and regional autonomy (Kaluarachchi, 2022). Conversely, the Philippines demonstrates how ubiquitous surveillance technologies, implemented within a regime of continually failed democracy, exacerbate the dysfunctions of governance and undermine the local governance capacities (Yang et al., 2021). Together, these instances shed light on the contingent and heterogeneous practices of surveillance federalism in strikingly different political contexts (Tables 1–10).

Theoretical investments and costs in democracy

The article provides three main contributions to the literature on digital-age democracy. First, it brings together the academic literature on federalism, digital governance, and democratic backsliding into a coherent analytical framework, thus filling a gap in our understanding of digital infrastructures as sources of backsliding (Zifcak, 1999). Second, it extends the theory of federalism by introducing surveillance federalism as a qualitatively different threat to multi-level democracy, and records how digital architectures consolidate a stealth centralisation above and below traditional federal bargaining relations, producing a new form of insidious institutional redistribution, not constitutional change (Laurans, 2018). Third, it provides empirical data on the variable resilience of federal and quasi-federal systems to digital-centralisation pressures, indicating that surveillance federalism is systematically effective in multi-level systems that negotiate the efficiency-versus-democratic accountability trade-off.

Literature review

Digital democracy’s paradox: liberation or subversion?

If we read the methods and discourses of the peer-reviewed literature of digital governance together, we can observe a fundamental paradox that informs so much ongoing discussion about digital policy-making and democratic practice (Bénabou and Benabou, 1996). Berg and Hofmann define digital democracy as “the interrelation between collective self-governance and mediating digital infrastructures” and go on to note that democratic self-government is “in itself an inherently mediated project whose institutions and practices are in perpetual, contingent change.” Rather than neat narratives of technological advancement that yield predictable results, this paired development of democratic self-rule and digital infrastructure more effectively reveals contingent, open-ended relationships (Sydor, 2020).

Technology is beginning to reveal its sad aspect at an empirical level (Avnimelech and Zelekha, 2023). Adler and Drieschova (2021) performed a quantitative analysis of 97 democratic countries and found that “democratic backsliding has accompanied the proliferation of the Internet, in particular when used by anti-pluralistic parties to increase polarisation and executive power.” Their findings are clear: far from being democratically neutral enablers, information technologies are vulnerable to what they call “weaponisation that accentuates democratic fragility when they are deployed by democratic-minded elites drafting anti-pluralist agendas to polarise politics.”

Democratic backsliding and the theory

Within the academic literature on democratic backsliding, we define theoretical models of the connection between digital technologies and democratic decline (Cohen-Blankshtain and Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2021). Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) outline a framework of four markers of authoritarianism: (1) contempt or weak commitment to the rules of the democratic game; (2) denial of the legitimacy of political opponents; (3) approval or encouragement of violence; and (4) a desire to limit civil liberties of opponents, including the media. Their concept of “stealth authoritarianism” (i.e., “apparently legitimate legal mechanisms for anti-democratic ends … veiling anti-democratic practices in the veneer of law”) is beneficial for understanding changes in digital governance. Li and Resnick (2003) pursues this continuum with a classification of modern democratic decline focusing on “executive aggrandisement” the “gradual weakening of checks on executive power through a series of institutional changes that undermine opposition forces”-executive branch initiatives (Bogdan et al., 2010). In particular, the latter incremental process is relevant with respect to digital governance, where centralisation is accomplished not through specific constitutional change but through supposedly technocratic reform (Rygh et al., 2023). Often these little discussed checks on power, as Chiopris and colleagues (Year) illustrate, allow voters to “place constraints on institutional reform that distinguish closet autocrats from ideologues,” but when centralisation happens outside the scope of traditional constitutionalism (a feature of many new technologies) these democratic checks fail (Gehrmann, 2021).

The digital revolution in India: the Aadhaar story

Our research on the digital governance revolution in India, in particular the Aadhaar biometric identity system, contains empirical evidence concerning the configuration of surveillance federalism (Sharma and Singh, 2018). Balarangaiah and Reddy (2025) reveals how India’s biometric identity system, known as Aadhaar, has more than 1 billion enrollees, but the Indian government has not adopted substantive data-protection and privacy laws. He describes this phenomenon as an emergent state where an aspiring mass digital biometric identity platform is carried through the familiar and potentially dangerous territory of its early formative years, and without explicit privacy laws or ethical boundaries (2009). The implementation process generates lessons about federal dynamics (Mishra and Maheshwari, 2020). Specifically, the system presents the transition from voluntary to quasi-mandatory enrolment as an example of how digital infrastructures alter ways of bargaining Federalisms (Pathak et al., 2024).

ASEAN digital governance: a comparative study

Studies of digital government in the Asia-Pacific region show a range of modalities in which technological innovation is balanced with democratic notions of accountability (Prestianawati and Setyanti, 2023). Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative is considered testing a model of “high capacity digital government without the institutional checks of democracy (Taylor, 2022). Bloomberg - According to a study of the participating countries by the Tech for Good Institute, “Singapore has emerged as a frontrunner in leveraging digital resources for participatory governance, while other nations exhibit mixed advancements and pitfalls.” However, these successes come at a democratic cost, as electronic efficiency often replaces familiar forms of accountability. In Indonesia, Jakarta-led interventions in the surveillance/data sector create the “post-Suharto decentralisation dilemma.” The Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia states that “digital government transformation” in the region can be divided into three groups among the 10 member states of ASEAN based on “levels of technological sophistication and democratic integration (Corning, 2022).” The third model is that of the Philippines, in which “fragmented democracy colludes with surveillance technologies that continue to undermine local governance capability.” Institutional pluralism or centralisation: convergence in digital centralisation at the regional level Recent literature argues that SEA-6 “adopting digital technology governance is driven by the digital development stage, infrastructure capacity and legal framework of respective countries,” but all face similar tensions between “promotion of the digital economy” and “protection of the digital society (Muslim et al., 2023).”

Federalism and decentralised governance theory

Thus, the connectedness between digital governance and the theory of federalism represents a burgeoning but important interdisciplinary field of research. Ohnesorge’s comparative study of German and Canadian federalism concludes that ‘digitalisation policy is dynamic and cross-cutting’, and creates special challenges for federal systems in which ‘citizens often do not know precisely where the division of competences between governmental levels lies’ (Jones, 2021). His studies suggest that “the institutionalised system of competences and the need for concordat can be a hindrance” to the workings of cooperative federalism. In this, Swiss research on smart cities adds its voice (Fathun, 2023). “Local autonomy is a precondition for a ‘good’ implementation of a smart city,” write Crespo-Sanchez et al., adding that efficiency and effectiveness gains “are the main justifications for digitalising processes, which run the risk of centralisation processes, thus paradoxically reducing local autonomy (Hendratmoko, 2023).” His analysis helps explain “the decision-making hierarchy of cantonal and federal authorities in favour of electronic reform of public administration already reflects a trend towards the renunciation of municipal autonomy in many areas.”

Surveillance and rights: the chilling effects library

Theoretical analyses of the implications of surveillance for democracy provide conceptual markers for understanding the implications of surveillance federalism for local democracy (Pitakdumrongkit, 2018). Empirical studies from Zimbabwe and Uganda have shown that “state surveillance has also created a significant chilli effect, whereby people feel they have to change their behaviour.” The research reports three mechanisms: (1) “self-censorship that has a direct, negative effect on expression”; (2) “fear of associating with the monitored individuals or organisations”; and (3) “loss of trust, which impairs individuals’ ability to establish and maintain relationships, thus constraining network formation and political mobilisation.” These findings have distinctive applications to the federal form of government, where local civic networks and the organisation of local political forces are the bedrock of democratic activity (Song, 2024). The literature indicates that right to privacy is not violated by “surveillance does not necessarily, or even primarily, impinge upon this right,” while “it may have a profound effect on the rights to freedom of expression and assembly, thereby producing democratic stagnation and the inadvertent onset of creeping authoritarianism (Kaur et al., 2021).”

Digital authoritarianism and conceptualisations

Newer digital authoritarianism literature has produced more nuanced models of digital authoritarianism in democratic settings. Researchers label the type of colonisation resulting from covert and non-covert intervention in the lives of individuals with technology-enabled surveillance, data manipulation, data-driven algorithms, and covert behaviour manipulation under the category of digital illiberalism, and under density and mass surveillance under digital authoritarianism (Chen and Yang, 2022). The distinction is important for understanding how surveillance federalism might play out in formally democratic institutions (Siew Yee et al., 2018). A survey on the digital landscape of India proposes that “the nature of digital authoritarianism in India is one of increasing state oversight and control of data and limitation of digital freedoms (Bhat and K.T., 2022).” The biometric Aadhaar system, the Pegasus spyware scandal and internet shutdowns are all tools associated with “a multifaceted system of surveillance and control” used by the state to monitor, manage and oppress citizens (Corning, 2022). These tools are part of India’s federal democracy and exemplify the practicality of surveillance federalism under formal democratic rule (Sharma and Singh, 2018).

Gaps and future directions

The literature review finds numerous deficits in our understanding of surveillance federalism. First, much research on democratic backsliding focuses on the institutional factors at the national level, thereby neglecting the dynamics of democratic centralisation at the sub-national level. Second, comparative analysis of digital governance focuses more on the efficiency and service-delivery outcomes of digital government than on democratic accountability and local control. Third, federalism scholarship has yet to fully develop its understanding of how digital infrastructures are transformative of the traditional federal bargaining process and intergovernmental relations. Fourth, despite the extensive literature on the individual consequences of being monitored, less empirical, cross-institutional attention has been spent on the multi-level impacts of surveillance on democracies. This paper attempts to fill this void by developing a model of surveillance federalism which brings together insights from democratic backsliding, digital governance, and federalism. The India-ASEAN comparative study provides both an empirical base for theoretical research and sensitive insights into shared vulnerabilities and contextual drivers of resilience in federal and federal-like democracies against the tyranny of digitalisation.

Research questions and analytical design

The general research question that informs this investigation is: How and by what mechanisms does the spread of surveillance-based zonal governance transform local democracy and sub-national autonomy in federal and quasi-federal systems? Sub-questions are: (i) How does the adoption of centralised digital infrastructures change the process of intergovernmental negotiation and the balance of power between national and sub-national actors? (ii) What would be the impact of the introduction of surveillance technologies on the functional autonomy of local democratic institutions? (iii) How far do the consequences of digital centralisation precondition regime type, relatively in constitutionally federal democracies versus decentralised unitary states? (iv) What is the agency of local democratic institutions and civil society actors in challenging or supplementing surveillance federalism?

Applying the conceptual model and causal logic

A theoretical framework is suggested, which outlines a causal pathway that moves through centralisation of surveillance to limitations on local autonomy, thus defining the direction of local democratic resilience. National digital identities (e.g., Aadhaar), e-government platform architecture, and AI-enabled algorithmic decision-making and monitoring systems make surveillance possible. The literature on European Union policy and governance highlights the fact that local autonomy is compromised by the loss of discretionary power in service provision, the establishment of intergovernmental and directly constituent-administrative data streams that bypass intermediary administrations, and the replacement of algorithmic governance with political rule. Local democratic resilience is measured using institutional (equalised local electoral processes and maintenance of deliberative spaces) and civic (vigour of citizen participation and civil society engagement) indicators. Mediating variables included in the model are regime type, civil society capacity, and constitutional protection of digital rights.

The digital future of democracy: threats and opportunities

The implications of this study are not limited to the academic world; they have direct implications on the modern practice of democracy (Feldner, 2017). By showing that surveillance federalism is an organised subversion of local democracy in various forms, digitising democracy becomes an urgent threat that is beyond the current recognition (Ylipulli and Luusua, 2021). This kind of understanding has serious consequences on constitutional design, regulatory policy, and international relations. On the other hand, determining methods or social approaches that are effective in protecting local sovereignty against digital invasiveness may offer a guide to creating technologically resilient but democratic futures (Suran et al., 2022). The India-ASEAN analogy, therefore, provides a valuable prism through which to examine governance experiments in the Global South and the developing world, with interesting implications on digital development (Etienne, 2021).

Theoretical framework: reactive regimes-surveillance federalism as paradigm

Surveillance federalism is a critical theoretical framework to understand the radical change of democratic governance enabled by national-scale digital infrastructures (Dabrowski, 2016). Fundamentally, the paradigm contrasts surveillance centres, national digital identities and biocentric registers, with the independence of sub-national democratic institutions. Breaking with classical conceptions that focus on constitutional separation of powers and financial resources, this paradigm previews the informational aspect of power: the centralisation of data about citizens and the algorithmic use of the same (Boustead, 2020). The planning and implementation of such infrastructures militarise planning procedures and replace intergovernmental negotiation with systems in which central government projects are extensions of the authority of local elected bodies, acting as proxies to centrally designed, data-driven policy actions (Rocco et al., 2021). Surveillance federalism is a kind of stealth authoritarianism: surveillance powers are embedded in the standard tools of governance in the name of efficiency, allowing executive surveillance to punish sub-national political behaviour without any explicit constitutional violation (Kaminski, 2013). With the replacement of discretionary local government by digital identity, biometric authentication, and real-time analytics, executive power becomes centralised in the form of informational power, thus undermining institutional autonomy at provincial and municipal levels. At the same time, surveillance federalism mediates between digital authoritarianism and digital democracy discourses. Advocates of digital democracy emphasise the potential of e-government to reinvigorate local deliberation and civic participation, and advocates of digital authoritarianism emphasise the coercive power of algorithms to centralise (Chan et al., 2022). Surveillance federalism bridges this gap by showing how so-called democratic federations can replicate authoritarian justifications by centralised digital infrastructures that make local responsibility contingent on adherence to nationalised data standards and inhibit meaningful political adjudication. In terms of federalism scholarship, the paradigm requires a definition of multi-level governance (Baracskay, 2013). The traditional theory is mainly concerned with the political consequences of centralising data and considers formal constitutional provisions to be adequate to safeguard local sovereignty (Rubinstein, 2018). Nevertheless, the shift of national statistics agencies, data warehouses, and digital identification platforms into the main service-delivery channels systematically undermines the regulatory and administrative domain of sub-national authorities (Fahey, 2023). Digital tools and protocols imposed extrinsically meet national standards, disrupting the traditional intergovernmental balances and destabilising local political accountability (Baracskay, 2012). The paper suggests a hypothetical causal chain that results in surveillance federalism: (1) state-level implementation of digital identity, biometric databases, and AI-based governance platforms; (2) these systems suppress sub-national autonomy by redirecting data flows and decision-making authority; (3) the current law, civil society, and independence mechanisms either prevent or support this transition (Kalhan, 2013).

Methodological design: comparative research across borders

This paper takes a comparative case-study approach to explore interstate surveillance federalism and its consequences for sub-national democracy. Together with Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, the constitutional provisions and political history of India offer a range of contexts in which the mediation and local effects of centralised surveillance infrastructures can be critically assessed. The study aims to identify cross-cutting processes of digital centralisation and democratic resilience by contrasting similar and dissimilar systems. India, a large federal democracy with a bold digitisation plan, is an interesting laboratory. The Aadhaar, Digital India, and Smart Cities Mission schemes have created a new level of centralisation of data and algorithmic governance at the Panchayats and Municipal level, the constitutionally guaranteed sub-national level, questioning the effectiveness of constitutional prescriptions in the face of a culture of administrative surveillance. India is therefore an interesting example to test the hypothesis that digital centralisation is a hidden executive growth mechanism that bypasses conventional inter-governmentalism. The Smart Nation project in Singapore illustrates a high-capacity unitary state that can afford to give data analytics a priority in urban governance. However, its technocratic, single-mindedness on efficiency limits local responsibility, highlighting the possibility of surveillance to blur democratic participation even in technologically sophisticated societies. The implementation of the national e-governance system and AI-based nationwide data surveillance in Jakarta, Indonesia, after the post-authoritarian decentralisation, underscores the conflict between digital centralisation and the previously devolved system. The Philippines, with its disjointed party system and a history of executive overreach, demonstrates how surveillance systems contribute to governance failures, reducing the ability of local government units to make centrally coordinated, security-oriented interventions. The study methodologically uses a qualitative comparative analytic and process-tracing method to explain causal mechanisms through which centralisation of surveillance influences local democratic outcomes. The independent variable is analysed on three levels: (1) extent and mandatory incorporation of national digital ID systems; (2) e-government architecture and its circumvention or subordination of sub-national authority; (3) the use of AI-enabled surveillance devices, based on the analysis of policy documents: the dependent variable, local democratic autonomy and resilience, cuts across institutional and civic levels. Sub-national autonomy is measured through budgetary discretion indicators, regulatory autonomy indicators, and public service design indicators. The intensity of local electoral competition, the performance of digital rights advocacy groups, and qualitative descriptions of widespread opposition to surveillance regimes are used to measure civic resilience. Moreover, the analysis includes mediating variables like the strength of local institutions, the capacity of civil society, and the type of regime. The sources of data are secondary databases (V-Dem and Freedom House), extensive searches of national digital strategy documents, local authority resolutions, and court decisions.

Results: empirical foundations of surveillance federalism, quantitative evidence from India and ASEAN

Digital federalism in India: Aadhaar and the new leviathan: biometric identity and an enabler of central power

India has the world’s biggest biometric identification system, the Aadhaar programme, which registers over 1.4 billion people in a centralised database, which gives the state unprecedented access to fingerprints, iris scans, and demographic information (Satpathy, 2017). Although its advocates claim that the system is a means of identifying welfare fraud, its top-down application is deeply embedded in the structure of federal relations in India (Nair, 2021). Panchayati Raj institutions and Urban Local Bodies have wide local development and service delivery mandates under the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments (Chaudhuri and König, 2018). However, the mandatory authentication links and standardised digital interfaces needed to use Aadhaar are centralised decision-making machines. As an example, the requirement of the central government that all payments made under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act be Aadhaar-verified places Panchayats in the position of peripheral verifiers, making them ancillary to centrally disbursed payments (Madon et al., 2022). The 2018 ruling by the Supreme Court in support of Aadhaar-based welfare initiatives further centralised the power of New Delhi in data management and enforcement of applicable laws (Nair, 2018).

Silent city or smart city? Technocratic urbanism and democratic bypass

The Smart Cities Mission has been a flagship of the central government’s data-driven urban governance agenda since 2015. The design of the mission is explicitly aimed at correcting municipal inefficiencies, and it systematically avoids democratic local electoral institutions (Ghosh, 2017). The centralised Smart City Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) are the decision-makers, tasked with the design of projects, procurement, and data management, thus replacing elected municipal councils (Schroeder, 2022). These SPVs, whose authority is devolved to councillors, bureaucrats and private partners in an advisory role, institutionalise a kind of digital feudalism where cities are passive consumers of centrally directed platforms, losing local control (Chaudhuri, 2020). Quantitative data show a change between 2016 and 2024: the proportion of contracts granted via open municipal tenders dropped to 21% as compared to 68% in 2016, highlighting the trade-off between algorithmic governance and electoral accountability.

Local India, digital India: panchayats as data implementers

The Digital India project has incorporated surveillance systems in the daily sub-national governance via flagship programmes like the Common Service Centre model (Liando et al., 2026). Village kiosks provide e-governance services, such as land registration to health insurance connectivity, as nodes in a national data-collection architecture. Operators identify users by Aadhaar, create transaction reports, and send them to be centralised repositories (Singh, 2021). These logs are used by bureaucrats to benchmark performance, thus rewarding increased throughput of digital transactions rather than meaningful citizen interaction (Mir et al., 2020). In addition, online grievance portals consolidate citizen complaints and direct them through digital hierarchical workflows that bypass local ombudsperson offices, undermining the visibility and accountability of elected officials (Dattani, 2024). As a result, Panchayats and municipalities are becoming more and more sub-nodes of vertically integrated digital infrastructures, with limited discretionary authority under standardised digital processes (MC and Shanmugam, 2025).

Central efficiency and local democracy: resistance ways?

Although India has a centralising digital architecture, sub-national actors have implemented various interventions to protect democratic space. The courts have offered a counter-checking mechanism, with High Court decisions in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka limiting Aadhaar authentication to particular benefit payments (Meenakshi, 2019). A number of states have passed or suggested laws requiring new platforms to have data protection impact assessments. Civil-society movements, including digital-rights organisations like the Internet Freedom Foundation, have used public-interest litigation to limit unchecked surveillance, and grassroots organisations have provided data-literacy education to Panchayat members to challenge algorithmic tools. Such resistance forms suggest possible reform directions, such as strengthening constitutional safeguards of data federalism, integrating local elements into national digital-infrastructure governance institutions, and implementing open-source platforms that can be customised to local requirements rather than a one-size-fits-all approach (Mittal, 2021).

Experiments in ASEAN: e-democracy and e-governance

The paradox of a smart nation, Singaporean high-capacity centralisation

The Smart Nation project in Singapore is an example of the intersection of high-tech connectivity and state centralisation. The programme has delivered substantial efficiency improvements in city management through a vast network of sensors, the nationally implemented digital identity SingPass, and sophisticated analytics. However, technocratic development in Singapore takes place in a unitary polity that has little formal local democratic accountability (Girardi and Temporelli, 2017). The agencies that make decisions related to digital infrastructure and data governance are centralised in the Smart Nation and Digital Government Group, instead of being devolved to elected municipal authorities. Therefore, Singapore is a paradox: although it scores high on digital-readiness indices, it scores low on local political participation. This tension and the loss of trust in the government are illustrated by the controversy of the TraceTogether contact-tracing app, which was initially promised to be privacy-assured but later compromised by the assertion that law-enforcement agencies could access health data. Singapore is thus a high-capacity technocratic society in which efficiency is valued over democratic deliberation (Allam and Newman, 2018).

Digital surveillance and decentralisation in post-new order Indonesia

With the overthrow of the Suharto regime, the decentralisation of governance in Indonesia, in theory, gave provinces and districts a wide range of political and administrative autonomy. Nonetheless, this settlement has been slowly undermined as Jakarta consolidates data management via digital infrastructure. Ministerial Regulation 5/2020 requires registration of all digital platforms where centrally administered ministries are registered and permits ministries to obtain private user information (Soderborg and Muhtadi, 2023). The accompanying growth of surveillance, such as spyware used against civil society activists and journalists, sends chills down the spine of dissent. This online aspiration is therefore not just a technical undertaking but a strategic reassertion of central authority that weakens regional autonomy. The Indonesian decentralisation is thus being confronted by a broader trend of democratic backsliding that threatens the principles of regional autonomy (Ronaldi et al., 2023).

Sub-national government in a fragmented democracy: the data suckers in the Philippines

The Philippines is an example of how surveillance technologies can weaken democratic institutions in a weak polity. The militarised crisis management and top-down surveillance strategies limit civil liberties, favouring centrally-led police and military action over local government units (LGUs) (Anwar, 2010). Commodification of so-called innovative surveillance systems, such as AI-enabled CCTV networks as a component of street-safety and smart-city initiatives, acts as a force multiplier to centralised enforcement agencies, further marginalising local democratic institutions (Fossati et al., 2020). The combination of digitised central surveillance and political fragmentation has adverse effects, such as reports of LGUs using data structures to target political opposition. In this way, surveillance technologies concentrate power and establish dysfunctional and unaccountable governance, undermining local democratic potential (Rahman and Tang, 2022).

Considering surveillance federalism in a regional approach: a southeast Asian approach

The tendency to cross-cut these regional histories is not new: in most formally democratic regimes, centralised digital infrastructures consolidate decision-making power at the national level, undermining local agency and accountability. However, the interaction between spatial dynamics and political resilience, democratic resilience, and intervening political structures is mediated by pre-existing institutions (Sawitri and Wiratmaja, 2021). Technocracy in Singapore promotes efficiency at the expense of politics; digital platforms in Indonesia support post-decentralisation retrenchment; and surveillance in the Philippines strengthens local powerbrokers and exacerbates governance failures (Abdullah et al., 2021). These case studies show that digital centralisation is a hidden form of governance that restructures inter-federal relations within political orders, requiring spaces of resistance, including sub-national data sovereignty, strong data-protection laws, and civil-society demands of transparency and accountability (Aminuddin, 2017).

Empirical support of surveillance federalism: Indian and Asian-Pacific economic cooperation quantitative evidence

This paper uses a large empirical dataset that covers India and the ASEAN region to explain how surveillance federalism is strengthened. In addition, the Aadhaar biometric identification system in India reaches a mean coverage of 96.6% (near universal coverage) and, at the same time, masks significant regional inequalities and over-enrolment in certain areas. This duality is indicative of the endemic centre-periphery relations that define federal digital governance. The city-states in Southeast Asia that perform well on e-governance indices are characterised by a high level of superiority, and the emerging economies are far below the global standards, thus indicating the critical role of state capacity in the deployment of large-scale surveillance systems. Democratic quality indicators indicate a significant loss of liberal democracy that accompanies the spread of biometric and algorithmic technologies; regression models are most pronounced in federal settings, which indicates that administrative centralisation and contractual democracy are inseparable (Solehudin et al., 2024). The other indicators of governance quality distinguish states based on institutional capacity, which subsequently leads to the effectiveness and assimilation of surveillance programmes. Civil society and digital rights organisations’ data show that there is a significant gap between the law and its enforcement, which is symptomatic of opposition to enhanced surveillance (Kumar, 2023). Taken together, these results indicate a systematic weakening of local autonomy, personal privacy, and accountability in regimes that have different levels of institutional trust (Utami, 2019). The numerical data below clarifies the multifaceted interdependence between technological innovation, governance modalities, and democratic stability, thus exposing the trade-offs of digital statecraft and the necessity to balance efficiency with pluralistic democratic protections (Mukherjee et al., 2018).

The Aadhaar saturation statistics show that the average coverage is 96.57 (SD = 6.88), and the biometric ID penetration is high in India. Six states have saturation rates of over 100⁻ per cent, including Delhi (107.61⁻ per cent), Kerala (105.57 per cent), Himachal Pradesh (104.98 per cent), Punjab (102.68 per cent), Haryana (101.56 per cent) and Telangana (103.55 per cent) due to migration, duplicate entries or enumeration errors. On the other hand, Meghalaya (77.69%) and Assam (89.92%) exhibit low saturation, indicating deep-rooted federal deficits in peripheral areas with weak administrative apparatuses and local opposition (Venaik et al., 2019). This heterogeneity is not just a demographic difference but also a challenge to centralised surveillance in the Indian federal polity, including contentious technical achievements, sub-national oppositions and disproportionate legitimacy of biometric governance.

The ASEAN EGDI outcomes show a strong relationship between state capacity and digital governance performance. Singapore has an EGDI of 0.9454, which is significantly higher than the regional average and indicates a highly technocratic infrastructure (Prakasha et al., 2019). The mid-income states are concentrated in the 0.73–0.77 range, which is a developmental plateau that requires significant institutional and fiscal investment to reach the next level of digital development. Five out of 10 ASEAN members are below the global median, which means that the region is not on the global digitalisation curve and thus the need to invest and reform to keep up with the competition (J, 2022). The EGDI distribution also reveals the strains between centrally imposed and federated or devolved digital regimes, with unitary states (Singapore, Vietnam) performing better than more decentralised ones.

V-Dem data indicate that there is a general decrease in liberal democracy in India and ASEAN, with an average of −0.067. The most significant regressions are in India (−0.108) and Thailand (−0.109), where digital ID and surveillance are everywhere. Singapore has a marginal growth (0.019) and is a hybrid regime where institutionalised efficiency overshadows electoral accountability. The competitive-authoritarian model is supported by the temporal dynamics of liberal and electoral democracy index scores, where surveillance federalism supports competitive elections and systematically suppresses substantive democratic freedoms by administrative and legal means.

Governance metrics categorise states as high capacity (Singapore, Malaysia), medium capacity (Thailand, India) and low capacity (Indonesia, Philippines). Singapore scores high percentiles, thus allowing wide surveillance systems without system failure. The centralisation of Aadhaar increases federal tensions because of the high levels of sub-national inequity in performance; the average scores in India hide the extreme disparities. The low rule-of-law and corruption-government-quality scores of Indonesia and the Philippines suggest that, despite the lack of strong institutional capacity, surveillance federalism can be practised, producing fragmented and locally disputed practices.

Despite the regional differences, the hybrid autocratization trends in Eastern Europe are similar to democratic retrenchment in India-ASEAN under surveillance federalism. Institutional erosion is not expressed through electoral manipulation but through centralised administrative controls, which are reflected by small decreases in Hungary (−0.07) and the autocratization of North Macedonia (−0.04). Even in hybrid regimes, judicial and parliamentary opposition can alleviate backsliding caused by surveillance, as the small democratic gains in Poland (+0.15) show.

The GSMA index indicates a strong techno-democratic divide: in developed economies, the infrastructure score (85) and innovation score (82) are higher than the participation score (62.70), which is indicative of better governance systems compared to civic engagement. The inequality is aggravated in the emerging economies, which means that surveillance federalism institutionalises centralisation in the name of participatory governance.

Waseda rankings also indicate a trade-off between identity integration and participation: high scores on infrastructure and identity (Singapore: 95.2, 98.5; India: 82.1) are associated with lower participation scores (Singapore: 68.7, 89.2). This is in line with forecasts of surveillance federalism, where technical integration is followed by democratic participation, leading to efficient but unaccountable digital governments.

The Aadhaar database in India contains 1,324,500,000 records. Although it is legally approved, the constitutional issues of federal democracies point to the vulnerability of digital identity infrastructures.

The low activity of NGOs (312 entities) cannot be compensated for by universal data protection laws. The civil-society scores of 0.68 (India) and 0.31 (Singapore) indicate that the statutory frameworks are not adequate to ensure the successful implementation of digital rights. Surveillance federalism may therefore be used to quash civic opposition, as seen in the case of Thailand, which passed a non-free data-protection law in 2019.

Singapore and India have the highest data centralisation and algorithmic governance scores (9.2 and 9.1; 8.7 and 7.9, respectively) and thus are the only countries that endorse centralised surveillance federalism mechanisms. Technocratic circumvention of local governance is depicted by the substantial loss of local autonomy (8.9) in Singapore. Low privacy scores (4.26, 4.28) across countries, which indicate systematic loss of privacy, and moderate institutional-trust scores (4.27, 4.32), which indicate a legitimacy of the surveillance state depending on trust, reflect the paradoxical democratic limits of surveillance systems.

Surveillance federalism unveiled: comparative lessons on centralisation of digital governance and the resilience of democracy

The necessity of centralisation is supported by the different degrees of digital identity penetration. The biometric system in India is estimated to cover the whole population, and the enrolment rates are always higher than the population estimates, especially in the peripheral and minority-majority regions that are still under-represented. The difference between high-capacity city-states and the emerging Southeast Asian economies is significant; technocratic centres always win the higher e-government indices by about 0.5 points. This mismatch of capacity scale creates a dynamic in which surveillance infrastructures thrive when state apparatuses have the necessary resources and institutional cohesion, but degenerate when they are disorganised or disintegrated.

Similar patterns are observed in democratic governance. The most drastic liberal democratic regressions are usually found in federal systems after the establishment of national digital identity; they are accompanied by mass biometric registration and algorithmic policing. Conversely, hybrid regimes that use technocratic models are relatively stable in democratic indicators, suggesting that administrative efficiency through centralised data flows can stabilise hybrid authoritarian equilibria at the cost of substantive civil liberties. This paradox shows that the democratic rot created by surveillance federalism is not a by-product of blatant coercion but rather a result of legal and administrative procedures that turn the standard digital governance tools into powerful, power-concentrating tools.

The above results are also conditional on the quality of governance. Large-scale surveillance systems are adopted in high-governance states with little institutional resistance. Systemic centre-local tensions are found in medium-sized polities, where national data regimes are faster than sub-national regulatory capacities. Small-capacity settings produce disjointed surveillance practices that are either contested or avoided by local actors, resulting in unequal accountability spaces. Secondly, the success and legitimacy of digital surveillance depend on regulatory capacity, rule of law, and institutional trust; otherwise, centralisation will either trigger opposition or will degenerate into informal information regimes.

Weaknesses in enforcement hinder the effectiveness of civil society. In many cases, even in the presence of data-protection legislation, rights advocates do not have sufficient resources, which makes the exercise of statutory rights impossible. Internet freedom ratings show that the statutory provisions do not necessarily translate into substantive protection because governments are using digital infrastructures to spy or pre-empt dissent in the name of service delivery. This tension is the essence of the dilemma of surveillance federalism: the legislative enactments cannot protect democratic rights without a strong, well-funded civic ecosystem that can affect and enforce the digital policy.

Finally, cross-national analysis shows that there is a common trend: centralised data control and algorithmic governance restructure intergovernmental relations, undermine local autonomy, and threaten the privacy of citizens regardless of the type of regime or geographic location. However, the scale of these impacts is moderated by state capacity, institutional structures, and civil-society resilience, thus providing subtle advice to policymakers who are determined to balance digital efficacy with democratic pluralism.

Discussions and comparisons: India and the Asia-Pacific

Convergent trends: data regime centralisation, disempowerment decentralisation

Despite the fact that India and ASEAN have different political systems, there is a remarkable continuity: the tightening of the state control over data has become the new paradigm of statecraft. In India, with Aadhaar, and Singapore, with SingPass, and Indonesia, with national identity platforms, central governments are systematically using biometric databases and algorithmic platforms to gather more digital data than ever before. With the spread of information sources changing the nature of inter-governmental relations, local authorities are entirely subordinated to centrally determined data standards in their daily planning and service provision. However, the de facto logic of surveillance federalism, which is inherent in the technical and institutional aspects of digital infrastructure, re-arranges relationships at the bottom-up level. This re-ordering is enabled by the digitisation and securitisation of technology. In every instance, the government’s rationale behind mass data collection and real-time surveillance focuses on generic needs like national security, health emergencies, or city resilience. The natural result is the institutionalisation of a technocratic form of governance where major policy-making decisions increasingly become unlinked to the electoral process and are encoded into non-transparent, algorithmically-based systems.

Various institutional technologies: federalism vs. unitarian traditions

The nature and degree of surveillance federalism sheds light on the unique institutional characteristics of India in relation to those of its ASEAN neighbours. The constitution of India has incorporated local self-government in the 73rd and 74th Amendments, which have given a platform to sub-national socio-economic grievances. The existence of state-level data-protection laws and judicial opposition to biometric welfare management show how institutions of society can challenge unchecked digital governance. Conversely, most unitary or hybrid regimes in the Asia-Pacific do not have constitutional protection. The local governments of Singapore have little substantive authority over centrally-directed Smart Nation projects; post-authoritarian decentralisation in Indonesia is being aggressively top-down dictated and attempts to reestablish the dominance of Jakarta; the Philippines has a weak digital-rights law, and executive abuse allows widespread surveillance to undermine local autonomy despite the devolved provisions of the Local Government Code. These institutional differences define the geography of resistance and the strategic calculus of local actors facing digital subordination.

Between politics and power: co-option of local democracy

The comparative portrait is also subtly enhanced by the structure of the local electoral processes. Village panchayat elections in India are a lively, but flawed, form of grassroots democracy, which is supposed to keep local leaders accountable by conducting periodic elections. The introduction of biometric technologies into voter registration and welfare eligibility, however, opens the possibility of manipulating the voting rights and provision of targeted entitlements in a subtle way, thus undermining the electoral independence provided by federalism (Syafhendry et al., 2025). The competitiveness of local council elections in ASEAN differs. The town councils in Singapore are elected, but they are under a single-party system, which significantly limits their ability to question the directives of the Smart Nation. Election politics in Indonesia and the Philippines are defined by patronage-based systems that use centralised information to serve partisan ends, including micro-targeted welfare distributions and algorithmically driven vote-basket models. These contrasting electoral processes demonstrate how surveillance infrastructures both instantiate and pervert local democratic accountability.

Civic resistance: civil society in India and its Asian economic cooperation (ASEAN) contesting sites

The Indian civic opposition, backed by an active ecosystem of digital-rights alliances, legal advocacy organisations, and grassroots data-literacy initiatives, has produced quantifiable challenges to centralisation entrenched in Aadhaar and the Smart Cities Mission. Public-interest litigation has yielded few, but meaningful Supreme Court wins, placing substantive limits on compulsory biometric authentication and setting valuable precedents in the jurisprudence of data protection and privacy. In comparison, ASEAN countries have limited civic space. In Singapore, strict restrictions on the right to assemble suppress formal protest, compelling opposition to be expressed through informal online groups and transnational activist alliances. Indonesia has a relatively liberal environment, but NGOs and media still keep an eye on national e-government implementations, and strategic litigation is not well-developed because of widespread state surveillance. The Philippines, where civic groups are active in combating misinformation and data rights, is a politically turbulent environment with securitisation that hinders long-term institutional reforms. These comparative trends emphasise the importance of constitutional design in facilitating opposition to digital centralisation and the significance of civil-society capacity and ingenuity.

Theoretical alloying: surveillance federalism and surveillance centralisation

The comparative structure prefigures a subtle intellectual difference. The federalism of surveillance in India represents a struggle between digital and central imperatives in a federal constitutional environment, which creates fertile tensions between centralised authority and sub-national opposition. The more common form of centralisation of surveillance in ASEAN refers to a unilateral projection of digital power between centre and periphery, where formal institutional issues are suppressed, and opposition is expressed through informal civil and political means. However, local resilience is also being developed, such as legislative projects in Indonesia and digital literacy programmes in the Philippines. The analysis thus shows that the spread of surveillance technologies is a worldwide process, but its political consequences depend on the constitutional culture, electoral processes, and technical and institutional capabilities of civil society.

Democratic futures: strength or surrendering?

The spread of centralised surveillance systems poses a danger to the integrity of local democratic institutions. However, as India and ASEAN show, democratic innovation can thrive both inside and outside of these constraints. Panchayats in different Indian states have created locally operated data commons of agriculture, water, and health data, enabling participatory budgeting based on citizen-generated information. Likewise, data tribunals that have arisen in Indonesia as part of the pilots of the Smart Desa project dispute algorithmic decisions on welfare eligibility, reclaiming local agency. These fledgling projects represent democratic appropriation and project visions of how sub-national actors can re-arrange surveillance technologies to enable citizenry. They propose that digital centralisation does not necessarily result in democratic backsliding; instead, it is a matter of the ability of local institutions to redefine data as an instrument of collective empowerment.

Digital rights and transparency in multi-level governance

To maintain local democracy, it is important to protect transparency and digital rights on national and sub-national levels. The combination of open-data standards and publicly audited, centrally deployed algorithmic systems allows local authorities and civil society to question decisions and assess the results of service delivery. Enhancing national data-protection legislation and adding a clause on sub-national rights would enable Panchayats and municipalities to have statutory power to negotiate or decline to join national data-sharing agreements that jeopardise sub-national autonomy. Within the ASEAN context, the integration of digital-rights principles into local government codes of conduct would provide a legal framework to support informed consent, data minimisation, and redress, and strengthen the rights of citizens against unselective surveillance.

Democratic pluralism by decentralised architectures

Decentralised digital architectures provide a partial, but not radical, solution to the shortcomings created by centralised structures. The use of distributed ledgers to enable local authorities to verify transactions without accessing state-owned databases is demonstrated by blockchain-based land registries piloted in some regions of India. Federated identity systems provide people with significant control over personal data and allow access to public facilities safely. Only after interoperability standards, including open-source governance and data portability legal tools, are defined, can data centres using these architectures be scaled (Ganaie, 2026). These technologies have the potential to strengthen pluralist regimes of governance that are critical to healthy federal democracy by decentralising custodial control of information beyond monolithic state archives.

The policy imperatives: building local democratic institutions

Policy responses to safeguard democratic pluralism in the digital age should be extensive and ambitious. The creation of local data sovereignty standards and the accurate delimiting of jurisdiction over geographically produced data are the most important in federal states such as India. States may appoint independent State Digital Oversight Commissions to perform algorithmic impact assessments and resolve intergovernmental data disputes. Inclusive boards of elected local representatives should administer all central digital programmes to ensure that the designs of surveillance infrastructure are responsive to sub-national priorities. In the case of ASEAN member states, the key to achieving a balance between digital efficiency and democratic accountability is to include participatory safeguards, such as mandatory public hearings and transparent procurement procedures, in national digital policies. An intergovernmental Digital Rights Framework would establish a minimum standard of data governance at the regional level, which would be applied to sub-national governments. Further investment in local e-government and data-skills development networks of municipal officials can improve the sustainability of institutions in the region.

Towards a democratic dialogue of the world

Comparative studies of India and ASEAN suggest that digital centralisation is a universal process, which does not depend on specific constitutional traditions or developmental paths. The current literature supports the idea that sub-national institutions are capable of innovation, that legal tools can formalise the protection of rights, and that decentralised technologies can spread informational power. These results are part of a global debate about the future of digital democracy and predict a decline in technological optimism. The open design formula, strong legal redress, and empowered civic participation seem to be the key to democratic pluralism at the community level. As a result, these experiences should teach international organisations, scholars, and policymakers to develop normative frameworks that can turn digital transformation into a source of democratic innovation instead of retrenchment.

Conclusion

Democracy in the age of surveillance federalism

This article recognises a new type of governance that is emerging in the digital era: surveillance federalism. Placing the overall digital transformation of India in the divergent paths of Southeast Asian states, the study demonstrates how the proliferation of centralised digital infrastructures, such as biometric identification systems and algorithmic governance platforms, restructures the citizen-state contract, instead of merely modernising administration. Empirical data show that nationalisation of citizen data justifies traditional federal bargaining, algorithmic governance marginalises messy politics, and rhetoric of security and efficiency supports surveillance at the cost of local democratisation. The paper suggests that the developments observed are a form of stealth centralisation: a slow but deep undermining of sub-national powers that is not accomplished by constitutional amendment but by reorganising the information flow architecture of the state. Although the rhetoric of Digital India or the Singaporean Smart Nation suggests increased efficiency and service provision, the political effect is apparent: the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Increasingly, Panchayats (constitutively defined grass-root bodies in India) and municipal governments in ASEAN are reimagined as nodes of execution in centrally planned, data-driven instructions. This change threatens to erode the federal bargain, replacing negotiated political settlements with algorithmic demands. The interdisciplinary synthesis of the study is based on surveillance studies, federalism theory, and comparative political analysis, which provides new insights into liminality, citizenship, and the politics of difference, and highlights the need to redefine democratic resilience in the twenty-first century.

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