Public defence: Karl Kristian Larsson

In most modern societies, a majority of public encounters between the state and citizens are on computers. Citizens who want to acquire the services of public agencies most often do so online and many public officials also depend on computers to do their job. Policymakers and public administrators often look to digital technology to make government services efficient and more accessible. The administration and business of public agencies have become digitalised. However, there is a concern that the impact of digital technology on public programmes is making them less able to support some citizens. The research question posed in this dissertation asks how the digitalisation of public welfare services can lead to the services being provided unequally between groups of citizens and which citizens are at risk of receiving services of poorer quality. 

The theoretical lens of the dissertation is the concept of administrative burden. In the research on public administrations, the concept of burdens has been used to study the obstacles and barriers citizens may experience while attempting to acquire public services. From a public administrative perspective, digital technology has affected the creation and delivery of public services by altering the roles of both the citizen and bureaucrat in public encounters. Many of the tasks and responsibilities formerly done by street-level bureaucrats are now handled by digital systems. This transition has two main consequences. First, street-level bureaucrats interact with citizens less, as citizens now are often expected to service themselves on online platforms. Second, both the citizens’ and street-level bureaucrats’ role in the process of delivering services and making decisions has been diminished in favour of digital systems and registry data. Both changes have altered how citizen acquire services. 

Furthermore, the research questions align the dissertation with the concept of the digital divide. As digital technology has become an integral part of modern society, many scholars have argued that a divide has emerged between those that have access to, use and benefit from digital technology, and those that are not advantaged by it. The digital divide has also been shown to run along existing socioeconomic lines of division, potentially leading to further marginalization of people in a weak socioeconomic position. These are the situations many welfare policies are meant to alleviate. Social policies are often designed to prevent people from becoming marginalized. If digital technology becomes the means for citizens to receive governmental support, the digital divide reduces the effectiveness of social policies. A digital divide in how well citizens acquire public services is therefore relevant to citizenship. To encompass this, the concept of digital citizenship is included to explore the wider implications of digital government on welfare policy and societal cohesion.  

Using Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) as case, this dissertation contributes to the study of digital government both empirically and conceptually. The methodical approach taken in this dissertation makes use of administrative and registry data from NAV to analyse inequalities in the administrative burdens citizens experience when acquiring services. Furthermore, there is also an effort to create a more conceptual description of the digitalisation of welfare programmes by examining NAV’s digital services and the overall Norwegian national strategy of digitalisation in relation to previous research in the field of digital government. This conceptual description emphasises the systematic limitations of how digital innovations in the public sector are used to carry out social policies and create public value.

The main finding presented in the dissertation and its five associated articles is that digital technology in government can make the value of public programmes more accessible for some people and more inaccessible for others. The potential increase in accessibility is achieved in two ways. Either a digital innovation simplifies its acquisition, making it simpler for some citizens to make use of, or it tailors the value of the public programme to the need of the citizen.  However, digital technology used in this manner is also limited in whom it is beneficial for.

Digital online services depend on the user’s knowledge and skill with both digital technology and government processes. In addition, while personal data about a citizen can be used to make a government programme more sensitive to their individual needs, the government might offer better customization to some over others. Consequently, citizens that are disadvantaged by their skill, knowledge, or amount of data about them become less protected by social policies.