A Digital Papereality: Experiencing and Negotiating Welfare Surveillance

The digitalisation of the welfare state involves the adoption of new technologies and practices that transform the relations between citizens and the state. These can support the work processes of welfare institutions with improved efficiency, but can also reduce the human discretion of practitioners, integrate hidden biases into evaluation procedures, or cast a net of perpetual suspicion on citizens claiming a right to social assistance in their time of need. This paper addresses the surveillance technologies adopted by social security institutions in determining citizens’ eligibility to social assistance and detecting incidents of fraud. Drawing on findings from fieldwork in Slovenia and Jerusalem (Israel/Palestine), it examines how welfare claimants experience and negotiate welfare surveillance, presenting the concept of a digital papereality to understand how such digital surveillance shape claimants’ actions.

The paper suggests that the spectre of disqualifying to social support can lead those who are placed under suspicion to mould their digital presence into a digital papereality, as evidenced in the public web and government databases, into what Woolford and Nelund (2013) called ’a performance of a qualifying version of the self’. Within this performance they continuously try and ‘present to different surveillance actors and their information databases a single corroborated qualifying script’ (Volinz 2021) of their life. This paper concludes with examining the potential social and political consequences to the introduction of digital welfare surveillance, and the transformation it brings to the modern face of the welfare state.