Datafication of Welfare Governance and Social Citizenship

The future of the welfare state is increasingly shaped by technology and data. Governments worldwide are introducing digital platforms, artificial intelligence, automated decision-making, and data-sharing systems into social security administration, employment services, healthcare, and social services. These developments aim to improve efficiency, consistency, and cost-effectiveness while bringing services closer to citizens through digital interfaces and infrastructures.

Although often framed as technical modernization, digitalization has significant implications for how social policy is designed, implemented, and accessed. Emerging data infrastructures influence how citizens engage with welfare systems, shaping the exercise of social citizenship—the uptake of rights and obligations within the welfare state.

This session examines how digitalization and datafication are transforming welfare states, social policies, and social citizenship. We invite contributions that critically explore how data-driven technologies reshape welfare services and the governance of social protection and labour market policies across different institutional and national contexts. We also encourage research on how these changes affect the agency of claimants and beneficiaries.

We invite papers conceptualizing and empirically investigating:

• Governance of digital welfare systems and data infrastructures at local, national, and global levels
• The capacity of digital technologies to help governments respond to complex citizen needs
• The role of data analytics, digital infrastructures, and advanced technologies in improving social policy design, evaluation, and implementation
• The ways digital systems structure and influence the agency of welfare claimants and beneficiaries

Preference will be given to papers that combine theoretical and empirical perspectives.