Algorithmic Centralism in a Fragmented Welfare State: Institutional Logics and Legal Paradoxes in the Chilean Case

ABSTRACT While scholarship on the digital welfare state has effectively critiqued the rise of ‘digital dystopias’ in consolidated welfare systems, it has paid insufficient attention to how digitalization interacts with the structural fragmentation characteristic of many states in the Global South. This article argues that in such contexts, digitalisation does not merely automate existing functions but introduces a distinct mode of governance: ‘algorithmic centralism’. Through a socio‐legal case study of Chile, it demonstrates how a centralised digital infrastructure (the Social Registry of Households) is deployed not to integrate but to hierarchically control a fragmented delivery network, imposing a dominant market logic and generating acute legal paradoxes with emerging data protection rights. The study concludes that algorithmic centralism, while solving coordination problems, creates unsustainable tensions with democratic accountability and the rule of law.