The Politics of Automated Systems of Governing: implications for public administration and gender equality

This 3-year project aims to make an in-depth critical policy analysis of the organization and practice of the politics of digitalization, in particular automated systems of governing (ASG).

By focusing on the organizations and actors involved in the governing of ASG in Sweden, we facilitate for important insights to the current risks of a) reproducing prevailing systems of privilege and b) the effects of ASG on public administration values.

The purpose of the project is to move the analysis beyond the common practice to primarily treat digitalization, and particularly ASG, as a technical issue and instead explicitly analyze how they are governed and organized as part of public administration. The design consists of 4 work packages (WP) connected to different phases of the empirical work.

Each project member will be responsible for a WP, based on his/her expertise.

We aim to combine and contribute to three different frontiers of research: literature on data-driven and ASG technology; social equality and the use of AI based applications; the ongoing marketization of public administrations.

The results from the detailed empirical studies constitute a platform from which we will synthesize and explain wider theoretical questions related to social equality and digitalization as well as understand ongoing and future changes in the function of public administration.