CONFIGURATIONAL POWER AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS OF DIGITAL DEMOCRACY

Resumo

_{Technology corporations now function as de facto sovereign actors over the infrastructures through which contemporary democracies communicate, organise, and deliberate, yet their accountability remains oriented toward shareholders rather than the billions whose political lives they shape. This article argues that such dominance constitutes a form of configurational power, a meta-institutional authority exercised through platform architectures and algorithmic systems that existing corporate governance frameworks cannot meaningfully constrain. During the 2024 US elections, it was observed how unilateral design decisions by major social media platforms destabilised the information environment at a time of increasing democratic fragility. To address this governance deficit, the article develops the concept of constitutional stakeholding, a paradigm that subjects quasi-sovereign corporate power to democratic accountability while remaining compatible with the core structure of corporate law. The framework introduces three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: mandatory tri-partite governance committees that allocate binding authority among corporate representatives, civil society actors, and community members selected through stratified random sampling; algorithmic constitutional review grounded in pre-deployment democratic impact assessments and continuous monitoring; and enforceable charter provisions that embed constitutional obligations through supermajority amendment rules and stakeholder derivative suits. The article concludes that constitutional stakeholding can be advanced through overlapping transformations in securities disclosure, fiduciary norms, and market-based governance pressures, offering a realistic pathway to align configurational corporate power with democratic self-government in an era defined by interlocking crises.}