Perceptions of Automated Decision-making and Good Administrative Behaviour: Paradoxes, Opportunities and Risks

The paper analyses how digitally, automated administrative decision-making can be conceptualised and understood in relation to norms of good administrative behaviour based on empirical findings from the Danish public administration. The norms primarily govern administrative decision-making including the bureaucratic encounter between public authorities and individual citizens or firms. The paper employs a neo-institutional understanding of norms of good administrative behaviour as being of both regulatory and normative nature (Scott, 2008) as well as Hansen’s and Vedung’s (2010) approach to evaluate stakeholders’ understandings in terms of ‘situational’, ‘causal’ and ‘normative’ views. Based on a high number of qualitative interviews and providing rich empirical detail it is shown that the consequences of automated decision-making for good administrative behaviour are widespread but do not form a singular, coherent whole. It underlines that themes of automated administrative decision-making and good administrative behaviour are ‘translated’ differently by individual civil servants and by individual administrative agencies and acted and organized upon in different manners.