Democracy and its processes of erosion do not unfold on a single plane. The literature on autocratization (V-Dem Institute, 2025) shows that democratic backsliding advances gradually in the electoral arena, but also in the guarantees and freedoms that are proper to democratic regimes.
In the electoral arena, generative artificial intelligence (AI) bears directly on political communication. Its capacity to produce and amplify disinformation at scale shapes the conditions of electoral competition and the formation of citizens' preferences. The discipline has produced a considerable body of research on the use of AI in state management and public policy. Nevertheless, a gap persists in rigorous research linking these processes to democratic quality from a comparative politics perspective. This gap becomes more acute at the regional level: much of the available literature concentrates on the democracies of the Global North, while the dynamics specific to Latin America and Africa remain comparatively unexplored.
In the non-electoral arena, digital civic space is threatened by cyberpatrolling and state surveillance, as well as by algorithmic governance, which operate upon the press, protest and online deliberation, and restrict the exercise of civil liberties.
These two dimensions cannot be analyzed separately: the erosion of electoral competition and the restriction of civic space are part of a single process of autocratization that today unfolds also in digital environments. Studying democracy in these environments becomes unavoidable, insofar as they have become a constitutive terrain of the democratic system.
This panel addresses the various manifestations of democratic erosion in the digital environments of Latin America. It invites contributions that analyze both the electoral arena, traversed by artificial intelligence and disinformation, and the non-electoral arena, where digital civic space is restricted by cyberpatrolling, state surveillance and algorithmic governance. In the face of a literature that has examined these dimensions in a fragmentary manner, the panel proposes an integral perspective, still scarce in the discipline, on how both processes converge in the region's dynamics of autocratization.