Contemporary State in the Context of Digital Technological Transformations: Political Opportunities, Risks, and Challenges

Abstract

Modern state faces the need to adapt to the changing external environment, which is characterized by intensive digital technological transformations. Thus, it is important to determine how contemporary state and its power institutions adapt to digital technological transformations and identify the key risks, threats, and challenges associated with such adaptation. To do so, the authors of the article conducted a corresponding international expert study, which allowed them to determine the degree of digital technological transformations’ influence on the functioning of traditional states and their power institutions. Also, based on the integration of expert assessments, the authors identified the essential characteristics of digital technological transformations’ effect on contemporary institutions of state power. The study results concluded that the digitalization of contemporary states and their adaptation to current technological transformations is a complex and largely ambiguous set of processes. These include both political opportunities and the associated risks, threats, and challenges for both the state and its institutions, as well as directly for the civil society, which is rapidly increasing its complexity and diversity through intensive digitalization. This brings to a wide range of scenarios for forming state and political management models in the context of a rapidly emerging digital technological reality of a new type. The article proves that the adaptation of the traditional state as a management system to the technologically more complex environment is necessary to ensure the effective viability of both the state itself and its institutions.