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Artificial intelligence (AI) is penetrating the domain of public administration with unprecedented depth and breadth, acting as both a powerful tool for enhancing government efficiency and a profound challenge to traditional democratic values and governance structures. To comprehensively understand its application roles, core challenges, and future governance pathways, this paper conducts a systematic literature review to construct and provide robust empirical support and systematic theoretical elucidation for a “tool-paradigm dual revolution” analytical framework. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we performed a systematic literature search and multi-stage screening of the Web of Science database, ultimately including 694 core articles for thematic synthesis. Our analysis reveals that AI plays a dual role in public administration. As a “tool”, it significantly enhances administrative efficiency in specific domains. However, its deep application is precipitating a “paradigm revolution” that systematically challenges core public values such as fairness, accountability, and justice by reshaping power relations and decision-making logic. Our framework reveals how the pursuit of tool-level efficiency endogenously and inevitably triggers paradigm-level power restructuring and value conflicts, particularly the problems of algorithmic bias and broken chains of accountability. The paper concludes that the introduction of AI in public administration is a profound governance transformation, the success of which depends not on the technology itself, but on the ability to construct a robust democratic accountability and ethical regulatory framework centered on “meaningful human control” and “data justice” to ensure that technological development consistently serves the public interest.
Wang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.