Algorithmic Governance

Algorithmic Governance
• The desire to take the human element out of governance.
• The quest for mechanical objectivity.
• If it is an automated process, assumption is that it is
• Objective
• Fair and unbiased
• Transparent
• Fast
• Weber’s dream becomes possible in theory after digitization and
technology have achieved a certain level of development
Social Organization: Algocracy?
• The key organizing structure connecting globally dispersed workers is
the programming code rather than a bureaucratic managerial
structure.
• Algorithms as distinct forms of social ordering, alongside markets, and
bureaucracies
• Software code or, more generally, technical architectures are seen as
one of four factors regulating social behavior (next to law, market and
social norms).
Algorithmic Governance
• “Encoded procedures for solving a problem by transforming input
data into a desired output”
• Intersection of digitalization, datafication, and governance through
technology
• Technological artifacts are “materialized laws” which have politics and
capacity to structure the social world.
The Promise
• Increase the efficiency and efficacy of state services by rationalizing
bureaucratic decision-making, by targeting information and
interventions to precise profiles or by choosing the best available
policy options
• Google Lens
The Promise
• Data sets, mathematical models and calculative procedures pave the
way for a new type of social quantification and classification.
• Efficient, robust, fair and accountable ways to classify subjects and
objects both into general categories (such as species) as well as into
specific dimensions such as psychometric types, emotional states,
credit worthiness, or political preferences.
• Optimize the detection of patterns in existing data sets.
• Increasingly also accompanied by nudges to optimize citizen behavior
as well.
Examples
• Categorization of citizens (welfare programs, parole, social worthiness)
• Categorization of workforce (recruitment and promotions)
• Disciplining of the people (surveillance)
• Training and education (automated tests, customized training pathways)
• Implications:
• Datafication and technological surveillance
• Social sorting based on such system identities
• Differential costs and benefits associated with system identities
Examples
• Recommendation of content on YouTube, Netflix etc.
• Wearables and self-tracking to shape behavior
• Recommendation of sellers on websites, attention tracking etc.
• Rating and scoring are not only applied to citizens, but also to
consumers, as valuation and quantification studies have pointed out
with regard to credit scores
• A domain dominated by the private companies working for profit.
• Everything is in the shadow of NPM.
Transparency and Opacity
• Invisibility of algorithmic systems and opacity of their operations
• The implementation of social norms into code not only creates
opacity, but also unveils norms and processes that were previously
hidden.
Value Neutrality
• Are AI and algorithmic systems value neutral?
• Discrimination, Information distortion, and Echo chambers
• A more nuanced version of this argument suggests that algorithms
are instruments used to exert power, shape reality, and, ultimately,
(re)construct social order.
• According to the 2022 Civil Service People Survey, the typical gender of a civil servant in England is female.
62% of civil servants in England are female, while 38% are male. This gender distribution is similar to the
overall gender distribution in England, where 51% of the population is female and 49% is male.
• The gender distribution of civil servants varies by grade. In the most senior grades, women are
underrepresented. For example, women make up only 38% of the Senior Civil Service (SCS), which is the
most senior level of the civil service. This is below the 45% target set by the government for the SCS.
• There are a number of factors that may contribute to the underrepresentation of women in senior civil service
roles. These include:
• The "glass ceiling": This is the invisible barrier that prevents women from reaching the most senior levels of
an organization.
• Gender stereotypes: These can lead to women being overlooked for promotion or being stereotyped into
certain roles.
• Work-life balance: The demands of senior civil service roles can make it difficult for women to balance their
work and family commitments.
• The government has taken a number of steps to address the underrepresentation of women in senior civil
service roles. These include:
• Setting targets for the number of women in senior roles.
• Providing training and mentoring programs for women.
• Making flexible working arrangements more available.
• These measures have had some success, but there is still more to be done to achieve gender equality in the
civil service.
Datafication and Surveillance
• To surveil entire populations and to create detailed profiles about
individuals on the basis of their ‘data doubles’
• Creates ample opportunities for social sorting, discrimination, state
oppression and the manipulation of consumers and citizens.
• Unfettered surveillance poses danger to many civil and human rights,
such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and privacy, to
name just a few.
System Identities
• Constructions of identity that are neither stable nor preconceived.
• From one's credit scores (financial identity), buying habits (customer
identity), medical records (health identity), risk scores (criminal
identity) to one's demographic characteristics such as age, gender,
income, region and education, algorithmic systems are simulating
persons without their knowledge and assimilating their data into
profiles in order to meet certain conditions of communication.
• Such constructions have been labeled “system identities”
Agency and autonomy
• What does it mean to have identities that have no phenomenological
reality?
• One is unable to identify with one's own identity, as it mostly remains
unknown to the person, and challenges their self-perception
• Identity categories and their significance is chosen for you
Bias and Fairness
• Automated decision-making by algorithmic systems routinely favors
people and collectives that are already privileged while discriminating
against marginalized people
• Commercial facial-recognition systems make mistakes with Black faces
at far higher rates than they do with white ones, partly because the
widely used training set was mostly male and white
• AI can hallucinate and it is not straightforward to conduct surgery on
neural learning networks
De-politicisation and Re-politicisation
• May effectively undermine democratic governance through increased
reliance on technocratic “solutionism”
• De-politicising due to their ‘aura of objectivity and truth’
• Social inequality, unfairness and discrimination translate into biased
data sets and data-related practices.
• Has led to new politics around these issues.
• Eventually, algorithms are likely to become a taken for granted part of
governance
What to do?
• There is a call to go beyond the notion of informed consent.
• Algorithmic systems within a digital economy need to factor in a
certain “qualified transparency” that should not demand an individual
consumer's awareness regarding algorithmic decision-making and
create experiences of “autonomy fatigue.”
• European legislators have made progress towards substituting the act
of “auditing” algorithms for one of “explaining” what they actually do.
• There is a strong emphasis on how the citizens affected by algorithmic
systems must have the right to know how a decision was actually
made
EU Act
• Applications and systems that create an unacceptable risk, such as
government-run social scoring of the type used in China, are banned.
• High-risk applications, such as a CV-scanning tool that ranks job applicants,
are subject to specific legal requirements.
• Lastly, applications not explicitly banned or listed as high-risk are largely
left unregulated.
Surveillance
The Surveillance State
• Algorithmic governance enables control of people through the
identification, tracking, monitoring, and/or analysis of individuals,
data, or systems.
• Information societies are at root control societies based on surveillance
• A continuation of the long-term project to control and manage
populations for the elite
Differential Control
• Surveillance operates as a mechanism for societal differentiation; it
assists with discerning or actively constructing differences among
populations and then regulating those populations according to their
assigned status
• Social sorting typically works through the differential application of
the same technological systems to the governance of different
populations
• “Marginalizing surveillance” entails unequal exposure to different
surveillance systems based on one’s social address
Automated Control
• Social sorting and marginalizing surveillance compounded and
insulated by the automation of surveillance functions.
• Depends predominately upon algorithmic surveillance systems, which
take empirical phenomena—translated into data—as their raw
material, ranging from commercial purchases to mobility flows to
crime rates to insurance claims to personal identifiers
• Spaces, activities, people, and systems are then managed through
automated analysis of data and socio-technical intervention
• Often involve a predictive orientation towards individuals or groups
Surveillance State
• Real-time traffic flow management
• Integration of face-recognition software with video surveillance
systems
• Geo-demographic mapping of crime incidents by neighborhood to
create risk-based response protocols for police
• Automatic exclusion of individuals from health insurance based on
their disposition for certain diseases.
Surveillance State
• Non-automated systems seek to identify and eliminate exceptions (to
keep everyone in line)
• Automated systems seek to verify conformity through processes of
anticipatory inspection
• Everyone is presumed guilty
• Social sorting allows differential treatment based on economic or other
status or risk indicators
• Marginalizing surveillance threatens with disciplinary disincentives
for those unable or unwilling to compete in the neoliberal world.
Surveillance State
• Surveillance works for the privileged
• Surveillance legislation is often done without democratic discourse
• Laws in Pakistan
• Safe city Authority
What to do?
• Appropriate legal protections
• Nondiscrimination
• Oversight and accountability
• Transparency
• Limitations on data scope and collection
• Secure post-acquisition data handling
• Respect for human rights, including privacy
• Training of overseers
• Democratic design processes and outcomes should be the primary criteria
for evaluating technological systems and deciding upon their social worth
GovTech
• GovTech is a whole-of-government approach to public sector
modernization that promotes simple, efficient, and transparent
government, with citizens at the centre of reforms.
• GovTech refers to socio-technical solutions – that are
developed and operated by private organisations –
intertwined with public sector components for facilitating
processes in the public sector.
• GovTech refers to cutting-edge technology solutions developed
by various players— notably start-ups, but also medium and large
enterprises, non-profits and others— that are transforming public
services.
Category Characteristics Example found in practice

GovTech for public • Citizen/ entrepreneur as • Digital identities

service consumption the end-user • Self-sovereign identity
• Multiple business models: wallets
citizens, agencies or both • Apps for requesting
pay for use social services (e.g.,
• Use of sensitive personal child support, social
data housing)
• Cyber-trust services for
digital authentication
and signing
• Voice assistants
Category Characteristics
GovTech for Specialized public agencies
intelligence, monitoring and regulatory bodies as
and supervision end-user
Use of (near) real-time
information
Example found in practice
• Drones for inspecting
dikes
• Internet of Things
solutions (Sensor and
trackers)
• Digital twins of public
services and (smart)
cities
• AI-based applications for
predicting infrastructure
maintenance
Category Characteristics Example found in practice

GovTech for public service • Public professional as • AI-driven decision

delivery, decision support the end-user support assistants for
or process automation • Public agency pays for public officials
use • Data-driven workflow
• Various: use of open management
data, sensitive personal applications
data, confidential data • Algorithms and business
or classified data rules for proactive
service delivery, robotic
process automation
Category Characteristics
GovTech for business-to- • Multiple end-user
government interactions groups: businesses,
intermediaries, public
agencies
• Use of sensitive business
data (historical, actual or
planned data)
Example found in practice
• Financial reporting
applications
• Public-private platforms
• Compliance monitoring
and audit analytics tools
• Dashboards for
monitoring the
performance of large
enterprises
Category Characteristics Example found in practice

GovTech for data-driven • Policy-maker as the end- • Domain/sector analytics

policy-making user (e.g., for residential
• Use of aggregated open planning or following
data (or data that must be waste streams)
opened for the public • Policy simulation tools
later) or citizen input (e.g., serious games)
(opinions, value trade-offs • Tools for citizen
etc.) engagement and
participation in policy-
making
New Public Service
Contextual Drivers
• Rise in dissatisfaction with the government in most parts of the world
• Despite NPM, government machinery continued to be seen as too
distant and unresponsive.
• The NPM reforms also led to concerns about accountability and the
democratic void in public service delivery
• While networked governance tried to resolve some of these issues,
values promoted by NPM were also questioned
• The post-modern context
Serving, not steering
• Neither the government nor the civil servants should attempt to control
or steer society
• Remember who owns the boat
• Why?
• Historically, that has failed to satisfy the publics.
• Historically, government has aligned with the elite interests.
• Civil servants do not really know better than the publics.
• If everyone makes mistakes, why not let citizens make mistakes and learn
to make important decisions.
• This is better for the society in the long-term
• Democratic Citizenship
• Government exists to ensure citizens can make choices consistent
with their self-interest by guaranteeing certain procedures and rights.
• Instead of efficiency, focus on responsiveness and trust
• Community and Civil Society
• An important goal of governance is to facilitate forums of interest
articulation for citizens.
• Facilitate (not create) constitution of civil society groups
• Discourse Theory
• Given that there is no single truth, the only truth worth fighting for is
one articulated based on open discourse.
 Key tenets of the New Public Service
Tenet
• Serve rather than steer
• Seek Public interest
• Value people, not just productivity
• Think strategically, act democratically
• Serve citizens, not customers
• Accountability isn’t’ simple
• Value citizenship over entrepreneurship
Skills Required by Civil Servants
• Negotiation, conflict resolution, brokering
• Public Value accounting
• Collaboration and freedom of expression
• Equity analysis of all services
• Understanding new forms of accountability
• Stewardship of public resources,
community engagement, democratic
dialogue, conservators of public
organizations
 E-Government + NPS
Citizen Sourcing (C2G) Government as platform Do it yourself
(G2C) Government (C2C)

Design Consultation & ideation Information and nudging Self-organization

Traditional: Townhalls Traditional: Brochures Traditional: Panchayat
ICT: edemocracy party ICT: Data mining, crime mapping ICT: Smart mob, community
portals
Execution Crowdsourcing & co- Ecosystem embedding Self-service
delivery Traditional: Academic alliances Traditional: Private schools
Traditional: Volunteers ICT: Gov open source and GPS ICT: Open source
ICT: Challenge.gov

Monitoring Citizen reporting Open book government Self-monitoring

Traditional: survey Traditional: Gov. Reports Traditional: Word of Mouth
ICT: FixMyStreet ICT: Data.gov ICT: Yelp, NHS Choice,
Ipaidabribe.com