Digital self-service can improve citizens' experience in public policies in many ways [15,18]. It draws on the promise of efficiency powered by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the so-called digital governments or e-Govs to solve the typical challenges faced by today’s states [3,25]. The promise is delivered through the ICT-enabled streamlining of administrative procedures [37] and the digital reshaping of interactions between citizens and public services [8,12]. Citizens are then expected to take on new roles, previously performed by officials [10].
In welfare policies, the right to equal access is at stake, as its clients are more likely to experience challenges in dealing with digital procedures—thus bearing extra burdens [27,35,36]. Much research addressed this unbalanced load distribution, and the administrative burden framework has been a valuable tool in this undertaking [16,22,24,28,29]. We explore the ways in which the administrative burden arising from digital self-service can impact vulnerable citizens’ struggle to access welfare policies in two opposing welfare state contexts, namely Brazil and Norway [1,19].
Our study focuses on the Brazilian National Social Security Institute (INSS) and the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV), the countries’ respective national social security agencies. Attendance in both agencies is diverse, as they manage comprehensive portfolios of welfare policies [34,38]. They include cash-based, means-tested social assistance, which entitlement relies on criteria related to the citizens’ need for state support. These are at the core of this study and typically involve complex procedures and heavier administrative burdens.
1. Administrative burden
Public administrative procedures are often a result of the layering of different political priorities over time, a mix of diverse policy implementation standards [13], citizens having to face a multitude of forms and cryptic decisions. These are administrative burdens, imposing the spending of unproportional resources of various natures to access public services [5,11,16,20,24,29,30]. In welfare policies, they can reinforce inequalities [23,24], and means-tested services are especially affected by administrative burdens, as they involve higher eligibility-testing complexity [17,39].
2. Digital self-service administrative burdens
Research has registered diverse effects of digital self-service on administrative burdens. Contra the promise that self-service digital services should ease administrative burden, its digital aspect can worsen it for digitally vulnerable people [4,35]. Also, they seldom cover different cases equally, benefitting citizens in standard situations [28]. In means-tested cash benefits, citizens’ burdens can be both reduced and enforced by digital self-services implemented in connection to political ambitions [22]. On the other hand, social infrastructure and support mechanisms such as third party help can alleviate burdens born from digitalization [21,24]. Nevertheless, empirical research is still needed, especially throughout diverse contexts [33].
3. Research design and methods
This research poses the following question: How the digitalization of social welfare services affects citizens’ administrative burden in the distinct Brazilian and Norwegian contexts? We strive to answer it by theory-directed, unstructured content analysis [26], extracting meanings from different sets of qualitative data collected from the INSS and NAV contexts. Concerning INSS, we use open-ended survey answers from nationwide officials (n=481), gathered in 2021, and semi-structured interview data (2022) from purposefully selected respondents (n=15). Concerning NAV, we analyze observations (n=11) of citizens applying for benefits at digital self-service stations in two different offices. Our goal is not to compare the two contexts, but to draw on the radically different welfare state institutional settings. We further explore how, and what kind of formal and informal structures thrive on the changes in administrative burden caused by digital self-service.
4. Preliminary findings
Both contexts highlight increases in administrative burdens linked to digital self-service. INSS officials point out that the distancing between officials and citizens increased dependence on third parties. Observations in NAV offices highlighted the different types of costs citizens meet in digital self-servicing, especially psychological costs, when the self-service system did not work as expected, or when citizens struggled with learning costs to understand digital procedures.
Reliance on interpersonal aid was the prevailing finding. At times informal helpers or service intermediaries were family members or friends, so-called ‘warm experts’ [6,32], but often they were actual third parties. Specifically in the Brazilian case, these often came in the form of despachantes. Despachantes are self-employed bureaucracy experts, who charge citizens for representing them in the face of public services [7]. They enjoy professional status, as recently recognized in Brazilian law [9], and straightaway profited from administrative burdens born of digital self-service.
5. Preliminary Discussion
The findings so far help to acknowledge a critical perspective about the reliance on third parties to deal with digital self-service in welfare policies. Often public digital services are inspired by private business experience, in which customers are nudged to actively participate in engaging procedures, improving the odds of successful market transactions by validating their effort, and thus creating market loyalty [14]. This is in line with public management trends on the co-production of public services [31], which can externalize to clients the need to become experts, both in the public service being co-produced and in the digital systems supporting co-production.
Alas, in the case of welfare services, interactions are one-off, and there is no point, from the applicant’s perspective, to become an expert. The rational choice is, thus, to rely on existing experts. Besides, the procedures in social benefits can be stigmatizing [2], relying on intermediaries becoming even more charming. Instead of co-production, we find a devious ‘tacit outsourcing’: the public service provider indirectly relying on third parties to service citizens.
The findings also highlight how digital self-servicing does not erase interpersonal interaction but evicts it to another arena: citizen-to-state dynamics are substituted either by citizen-to-citizen (as in the NAV case) or citizen-to-business (as in the INSS case).
