Across these reviews, better evidence and stronger administrative capability repeatedly improve what institutions can know or do without settling whether the resulting authority is legitimate. That boundary appears in different forms: perceived legitimacy in AI-enabled public administration, institutional reliance in trust infrastructure, authenticity judgments in electoral information systems, and informational coherence in algorithmic sovereignty.
The public-administration study supplies evidence about legitimacy formation. Procedural fairness and perceived accountability can increase acceptance of AI-mediated state action. The sharper conclusion is deliberately narrower: acceptance describes a relationship between people and an institution, but it does not establish that the institution's authority is justified, contestable or effectively constrained.
The national trust-architecture review reaches the same boundary through verification. Cryptographic validity, issuer identity, provenance and current status can support a decision, but the relying institution must still determine whether the issuer had authority, whether the purpose is permitted, whether the relying party itself may act, and who bears responsibility. Verification can therefore strengthen a governance decision without becoming the governance decision.
The electoral-AI review adds disagreement. Provenance and forensic capability can make authenticity claims more inspectable, yet politically consequential evidence can still produce conflicting determinations among election authorities, courts, platforms, fact-checkers and affected actors. Evidence infrastructure improves the quality of the dispute; it does not establish who is entitled to resolve it, under which threshold, with what correction process or appeal.
The algorithmic-sovereignty review makes the institutional consequence especially visible. Better demographic evidence, interoperability and administrative coherence can strengthen state capacity while also making surveillance, exclusion and centralized coordination easier to scale. The archive therefore does not support treating coherence as a proxy for legitimate sovereignty. A capable state and a legitimate state are analytically related but not interchangeable propositions.
Taken together, these reviews support a stronger cumulative claim: evidence can establish facts, improve coordination and constrain some forms of discretion, but legitimacy requires separately governed decision rights, institutional constraints and contestability. This is why provenance, transparency, accuracy, acceptance and interoperability should be treated as inputs to legitimate governance rather than as substitutes for it.
The unresolved question is adjudication. When authoritative evidence, institutional mandates or policy interpretations conflict, which actor may decide, what standard applies, how is the decision corrected, and where can an affected party appeal? Until those questions are operationally specified, stronger evidence can improve governance capacity while leaving the legitimacy of consequential decisions unsettled.
Traceability
This synthesis is a human-edited analytical artifact produced with AI/LLM assistance under `AI-USAGE.md`. Its claims are grounded in the constituent reviews listed in front matter and, through them, in the underlying papers. It should be refreshed when new evidence materially changes the archive's distinction between evidence, legitimate authority and contestability.