The platformisation of welfare provision: automated decision making and the digital welfare state.

Automated decision-making using algorithmic systems is increasingly being introduced in the public sector constituting one important pillar in the emergence of the digital welfare state. Promising more efficiency and fairer decisions in public services, repetitive tasks of processing applications and records are, for example, delegated to fairly simple rule-based algorithms. In this talk, I will conceptualize introduction of automated decision-making in the public administration as platformization of welfare provision. Taking the growing trend of delegating decisions to algorithmic systems in Sweden as a starting point, I will discuss how the platformization of welfare provision and the emergence of the digital welfare state is legitimated by way of analyzing two litigation cases about fully automated decision-making in the Swedish municipality of Trelleborg. Based on engaging with court rulings, exchanges with the Parliamentary Ombudsmen and in-depth interviews, the I show how different, partly conflicting definitions of what automated decision-making in social services is and does, are negotiated between the municipality, a union for social workers and civil servants and journalists. Describing this negotiation process as mundanization, I engage with the question how socio-technical imaginaries of the digital welfare state are established and stabilized.