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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the "simulative turn" in which Big Data and AI reshape logics and practices of governing. It argues that these reconfigure political epistemology, shifting political practice grounded in representation and conflict toward regimes centered on modelling, prediction and preemption.

Paper long abstract

Over the past decade, public sector and political bodies have increasingly developed and deployed algorithmic, data-driven technologies to inform decision-making. These include sandboxes, testbeds and, more recently, digital twins as experimental governance infrastructures. Entangled with narratives of evidence-based policymaking, smart government, and experimentalist governance, their deployment raises questions about democracy and the political itself. Data analytics is often framed as better able to anticipate citizens’ needs and interests than citizens themselves. In this sense, such technologies reflect Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the vanishing of representation in the age of simulation and Donna Haraway’s claim that simulation replaces representation in the information society, signaling a potential erosion of political representation. This paper asks: To what extent do algorithmic, data-driven technologies in the public sector instantiate simulation as a pervasive form of governmentality? And what are the implications of this simulative turn for the very idea of political representation? Methodologically, the study combines close reading and Foucauldian critical discourse analysis, drawing on urban governance in the EU as an empirical case. It traces how simulation has emerged as a political technique to execute political agendas. As simulations become embedded in governance and decision-making, they reinforce a technocratic paradigm that seeks to datafy and quantify the world. The emphasis on predictive, data-driven evidence signals a shift from a political practice grounded in representation and conflict toward modelling and pre-emption. This transformation reconfigures political epistemology, positioning the assumption of predictability of political opinion forming as the unquestioned legitimacy horizon of political deci-sion-making.