Unpacking the Varieties of State-Market Relations in Welfare Digitalisation: 'divergent Convergence' in the Wake of the AI Breakthrough. a Comparative Analysis in Five European Public Employment Services.

The decreasing cost of managing information sources is driving all sectors - including the public sector - to accumulate data, with increasing trends towards artificial intelligence (AI). New forms of data analysis are progressively enabling welfare bureaucracies to improve the design and delivery of services. The debate that has emerged so far has mainly focused on changes in welfare service delivery leading to a process of convergence on a same New Public Management (NPM) agenda of reforms across countries. According to this view, those who are already on the margins of the welfare system are shown to be unable to access, use or otherwise participate in mandatory digital systems.

Focusing on a crucial sector such as Public employment services (PES), this paper shows that it is not sufficient to interpret welfare digitalisation only as a means of making services efficient through converging NPM mode of governance. Indeed, the retreat of the state from public provision must also be read in terms of increasing private responsibility over the most valuable resource in a context of increasing reliance on AI in decision-making: the data. In these respects, what this paper highlights is how it is possible to see welfare retrenchment to the extent that welfare digitalisation had the potential to transfer the responsibility for key data assets and informational infrastructures to private actors in order to achieve technological targets. Following a two-part argument - state-citizen relations vs state-market relations - original data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with PES officials. A total of 27 subjects was interviewed, between January 2021 and September 2022, in five countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands. While from the traditional perspective of state-citizen relations a convergence can actually be found, under the perspective of state-market relations more divergent responses emerge.