Citizens ‘on mute’ in digital public service delivery (Part 2)
This article is written by Sarah Giest, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration — Leiden University, based in the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs. She researches public policy, big data, sustainability and innovation. Sarah is also a member of Young Academy Leiden, and of the Editorial Board of the Data & Policy Journal. It was preceded by another contribution with a focus on establishing the issue of citizen voice exclusion in digital public service delivery.
As discussed in Part 1, digital welfare systems pose an academic and societal challenge for different groups of stakeholders.
- For governments, there is pressure to engage citizens in developing and implementing digital systems, however there is a struggle to keep a balance between burdening already vulnerable parts of society, such as welfare recipients, while also making this a meaningful contribution to the process.
- For researchers, there has been a focus on the government side of these digital citizen-state interactions and the concern that citizens are merely treated as objects of research and thus overlooked when it comes to the social and equity footprint of policy implementation (Masood and Nisar 2021).
In sum, this issue is a multi-layered and multi-disciplinary challenge given that input is required in design, implementation as well as during the process and after a decision is handed down by a (semi-)automated system. This further necessitates an understanding of three major elements:
- The technical system and the details of digitalization and automation underlying, for example, digital social welfare systems.
- Integration and implementation of such a system in public administrations, as well as legal implications for decision-making procedures that are (partially) taken on by an automated system. This includes the government administration at large, but specifically those bureaucrats at the front-line or so-called ‘street-level bureaucrats’, that are directly involved in the experiences that citizens have and that also interact with the digital system.
- An understanding of the behavioural and psychological factors of why, how and when citizens are able and willing to engage with digital systems to receive public services.
This approach paints a picture of a more nuanced understanding of citizens dependent on the state for assistance and thus dependent on a digital system to accommodate different types of digital skills, accessibility issues, complex case files as well as voicing concerns or clarifications. If these points are not addressed, there are democratic issues that directly relate to concerns over a new digital divide due to political inaction by citizens facilitated by automation of decision-making processes.
End of Part 2 and the blog post. Part 1 is available here.
References
Masood, A. and M.A. Nasir. 2021. Administrative capital and citizens’ responses to administrative burden. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 31(1), 56–72.
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