Platform Level Bureaucracy and Social Inclusion

forthcoming

PERSON - Platform Level Bureaucracy and Social Inclusion PERSON analyses what happens to the bureaucratic encounter and to street level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) discretion when access to service becomes digital. Studying the use of three platforms for accessing Job Centres activated in Italy (DID Platform), Canada (Québec.ca Platform), and the Netherlands (UWV Platform), PERSON investigates the way in which digital bureaucratic encounters affect SLBs’ discretion and aims to develop guidelines for an inclusive public platform design, overcoming barriers related to gender, age, and ethnicity. The core idea revolves around how digital practices change not only the way SLBs use their discretion, but also the very nature of the bureaucratic encounter between users and SLBs, consequently, it appears necessary to investigate the relationship between these two actors, mediated by digital public platforms. The research will be conducted in three countries with three different levels of digitisation of the public sector, through the implementation of creative and replicable tools for digital qualitative research (Digital Subsystem Technique; Vignette Techinque for Internet Based Research). PERSON wants to understand whether the digital bureaucratic encounter amplifies or reduces the effects of the characteristics of the actors (SLBs and users) on the actual access to the public service. The final objective is to develop guidelines to design an inclusive platform for the public sector by comparing similar platforms in three different digitisation contexts.