Justice beyond the courts: The implications of computerisation for procedural justice in social security

This chapter considers the implications of computerisation for procedural justice in social security. It outlines an approach to the analysis of administrative justice-defined as the justice inherent in routine administrative decision making-that is derived from Jerry Mashaw's pioneering study Bureaucratic Justice. This approach explains the prevailing system of procedural justice in terms of the 'trade-offs' between six normative models of adminstrative decision making. The six models are associated with bureaucratic, professional, legal, managerial, consumerist, and market forms of decision making, and the 'trade-offs' reflect the outcomes of power struggle between different groups of social actors who champion the various models. This chapter attempts to determine whether, and if so how, computerisation affects the balance of power between the competing models of procedural justice and the groups of social actors who seek to promote them. It is based on an expert-informant study carried out by the authors. Two indicators for each of these six models were formulated and expert informants in 13 OECD countries were asked first to rate their importance on a 1-5 scale and second to assess, using another 1-5 scale, whether computerisation had made them more or less important. The main findings reported in the chapter suggest first that bureaucracy, followed by managerialism and legality are the most important determinants of administrative justice in social security, while the market followed by professionalism and consumerism are the least important, and second that the effect of computerisation has been to further entrench the bureaucratic and managerial models and undermine the professional model. The chapter relates these findings to data on to the aims of computerisation, the extent to which social security systems had embraced computerisation, and the emphasis that social security systems placed on data protection. In addition to generalising about the experiences of the 13 countries in the study, the chapter also describes the experiences of individual countries. It concludes that computerisation has altered the characteristics of service delivery by promoting some forms of administrative justice over others in particular by strengthening 'top-down' and managerialist forms of accountability at the expense of 'bottom-up' and rights-based approaches, and ends with a plea for a greater research focus on the administration of welfare and its justice implications