The impact of digitalization on modern democratic processes and public administration

The article is devoted to the study of the impact of digital technologies and digitization on modern democratic processes and the effectiveness of public administration. It is determined that digitalization is the transformation of data or information from analog to digital or binary, which opens up new ways of functioning, interaction with citizens and civil society as a whole, and providing services to the population. It is determined that the activities of the Council of Europe in recent decades have been devoted to three areas of digital transformation, in particular: e-democracy (including e-government, e-voting and e-participation), Internet-media and election campaigns, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. The key recommendations and conclusions regarding the necessity (and to a certain extent the inevitability) of introducing digital transformation into the voting process, which allows covering a wider range of interested persons, are analyzed. At the same time, it is cautioned that modern machine learning tools have a growing ability to influence emotions and thoughts, which can become a source for manipulating and controlling not only economic choices, but also social and political behavior. This also applies to artificial intelligence, the spread of which must be ensured with the simultaneous development of legal mechanisms for the protection of human rights in the event of any violations during the use of AI. The current state of digital transformation is also analyzed, which is focused on changing the design of existing administrative processes with a «digital first» position, when the public administration primarily focuses its own procedures on the network-users or the user of a certain digital technology. Proposals were made to improve interaction between society and public administration in the aspect of electronic governance by ensuring the openness and transparency of the latter’s actions and taking into account the suggestions and needs of interested parties.