The accountability gap: Shadow digital labor and the crisis of accountability in automated welfare

Automated welfare systems increasingly rely on complex assemblages of algorithms, administrative rules, and forms of digital labor that remain legally and institutionally invisible. This article develops a sociolegal analysis of what it terms the “accountability gap:” the structural disjunction between formal legal responsibility and the practical conditions under which automated welfare decisions are produced, maintained, and contested. Using the Chilean sociolegal and institutional landscape as a crucial case study, the article conceptualizes “shadow digital labor” as a constitutive yet unacknowledged component of contemporary welfare governance. It illustrates how “digital-by-default” welfare architectures clash with new GDPR-inspired data protection frameworks (Law No. 21.719), producing an asymmetrical distribution of compliance risk. Rather than proposing a comprehensive theory of automation, the analysis offers a jurisprudential typology of “law in action” to examine how accountability is displaced across human and technical actors.