The role of digital discretion in a welfare state

The concept of digital discretion has been defined as information and communication technology (ICT) influencing or replacing the professional judgment of civil servants. Studies within digital discretion has mainly taken a civil servants perspective focusing on how ICT can constrain or enable discretionary practices (Bovens and Zouridis 2002; Wenger and Wilkis 2009; Wihlborg et al. 2016) have investigated how fully or partially automated services change the civil servant´s professional roles, processes and influence their professional judgments.In the areas of welfare such as social service work, health and care the use of digital technology is under rapid development. Developed welfare states tend to trust the technology and the algoritms, to make them treat clients more equally, close the gap between policy as written and as preformed and making decision-making more efficient (Wirtz et al., 2018), a shift is seen to use computerized routines and analyses to influence or replace human judgements (Wihlborg et al., 2016, Wirtz et al., 2018). This kind of “digital discretion” will of course affect the role of street-level bureaucrats and the work practices they perform. A recent literature review shows that many researchers in this area is negative to this trend, while others show that digital discretion has the potential to change the nature of the public service provision, strengthening ethical as well as democratic values.The focus of this paper is on digital discretion and its impact on civil servants, in this case social case workers, as an effect of introducing automated decision-making into the social services work with social assistance in Sweden.The aim is to enhance the understanding of how digital discretion, as an effect of introducing automated decision-making of social assistance, affect social case workers working with social assistance in their roles, working process and professional judgments. The paper will answer the following two research questions: 1) how can the implications of digitalization and automated decision-making on civil servants´ discretion and law-proof decision-making be described? 2) how can these changes affect the outcome of the welfare?The paper is based on semi-structured interviews with key informants as social case workers, team leaders and politicians has been made in five municipalities in Sweden (2019-2021) and analyzed with theories of digital discretion and law-proof decision-making.The results will discuss how digital discretion impact the discretion for social case workers in their practice and how that can affect the outcome of welfare and social justice