LIST OF PANELS

The 21st century has witnessed the rise of technology aided and increasingly driven public administration. While often largely technical in nature, efforts that draw upon ICTs, data, and AI, are intended to simultaneously provide citizens with greater opportunities to directly and collaboratively impact community decision-making as well as to put in place more accurate and evidence-based policies. Yet, these transformations also produce quite profound political challenges for conceiving and implementing a fair, inclusive, and impactful 21st century politics and public sector. Indeed, data driven and automated systems of governance involve political choices and ambitions already at the level of design and computational logic (cf. Bucher, 2018; Gillespie, 2014). Thus, regardless of whether such systems help select and curate information for the purpose of providing better public services, or if they are made to act upon data and information in order to make decisions with respect to, for instance, social services or health care, they carry with them a political dimension with implications in terms of power and democracy, not least risking to enhance systems of marginalisation in relation to gender, race and other social categories. A crucial aspect of power and democracy associated with data driven and automating systems in the public sphere, is how different systems of privilege play out in these processes (Eubanks 2018). Earlier research shows how women and racialized groups are in minority in the design processes, how AI systems like face recognition are built of white male faces, and how digital tools replicate and reproduces racial injustices (D’Ignazio & Klein 2020).

Although there is an ongoing discussion regarding the ethical challenges and dilemmas of the implementation of AI systems and automation in society at large (c.f. Dignum 2020), and in particular in relation to the practices of the public sector, these discussions to a large extent miss out on the political implications of this development. While researchers and developers are called on to safe-guard democracy, exercise responsibility and make fundamental human values the basis of their design and implementation of AI systems, politicians are often left out of the discussion.

The general objective of this panel is to put politics and governing practices in the centre of attention when analysing the effects of implementing data driven and automated systems in the public sector. Hence, in this panel, our aim is to put politics, not the technology, in focus, and address the research question: What are the political implications of the increasing implementation of data driven and automated systems in the public sector?

The general objective of this panel is to put politics and governing practices in the centre of attention when analysing the effects of implementing data driven and automated systems in the public sector. Hence, in this panel, our aim is to put politics, not the technology, in focus, and address the research question: What are the political implications of the increasing implementation of data driven and automated systems in the public sector?

In other words, we wish for papers in this panel to recognize and emphasize the profound political nature of automated systems of governing in the first place. From such a position then, we intend to facilitate a discussion that seeks to further the discussion on what a responsible politics with respect to automated systems of governing could look like. This would involve, but not be limited to, questions of accountability, public engagement and participation.

We welcome papers that address the political implications of data driven and automated systems from a variety of analytical perspectives, and which focus on different aspects, from designing processes and policy outcomes to more general challenges of liberal democracy. Consequently, political implications are also understood in a broad manner, reaching from more theoretical discussions on the challenges for democratic governing, to how the implementation of for example AI effects a specific policy outcome. Both national case studies and comparative studies are welcome, as are theoretical contributions. Of special interest are papers that emphasise societal power relations, like feminist and post-colonial perspectives. We also welcome papers that addresses the relationship between private corporations and the public sector, i.e. how the marketization of the public sector plays out in relation to the implementation of data driven and automated systems.

References:

Bucher, T. (2018) If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics [online]. Oxford University Press.

Dignum, V. (2019) Responsible Artificial Intelligence: How to Develop and Use AI in a Responsible Way, 1st ed. 2019 edition. S.l.: Springer.

Gillespie, T. (2014) ‘The Relevance of Algorithms’, in T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski and K. Foot (eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 167–94.

D’Ignazio, C. & Klein, L. (2020) Data Feminism, Boston: MIT Press.