The hidden costs of digital self-service : administrative burden, vulnerability and the role of interpersonal aid in Norwegian and Brazilian welfare services

Abstract

It is a global trend to transform our contemporary societies through the development and adoption of new information technology which spans across social structures and challenges established institutions. The promises of economic efficiency make it almost imperative to digitally transform public services, and as a result, self-service has increasingly become adopted within the public sector. Digital self-services have been promoted as the panacea for improving public services’ responsiveness while reducing governments’ expenditures, ultimately lowering general taxpayers’ burdens when dealing with public administration. However, the cost for citizens in relation to the loss of service once provided in person is relatively unexplored. In this article, we resort to the theory of administrative burden to understand ways in which digital self-service solutions externalize costs to the citizens in need of public welfare services by imposing new types of burdens in distinct welfare state settings, namely in the Brazilian and Norwegian contexts. We perform unstructured, theory-informed content analysis on observations and interview data from welfare service office settings in both countries. Preliminary findings show how digital self-service in welfare policies sets the stage for interpersonal aid or intermediaries, which are given different names and are understood in different ways according to the countries’ institutional environments. The article problematizes digital self-service from an economic distributive justice stance and shows how such challenges are dealt with in two different welfare contexts, highlighting ethical issues in cases where digital self-services risk further marginalizing vulnerable groups of citizens.