Data Entry and Decision Chains: Distributed Responsibility and Bureaucratic Disempowerment in the UK’s Universal Credit Programme

Digitalising public programmes creates new accountability challenges, many of which are under-theorised. Using Universal Credit to illustrate its points, this article argues that the distributed infrastructures upon which digital government programmes rely create extended chains of decision-making actors. Each link along the chain is responsible for decision-making components, such as data entry and interpretation. This phenomenon has three significant effects. First, it distributes administrative responsibilities widely. Second, it ‘publicises’ actors previously considered ‘private’, by integrating companies and landlords into public decision-making processes. Third, it bureaucratically disempowers, because it makes it difficult for all actors to recognise and address errors. In some cases, it prevents them from knowing they are involved in decision-making processes at all. Drawing on public administration, socio-legal studies and public law scholarship, we reconceptualise ‘administrative burden’, ‘bureaucratic disentitlement’ and ‘privatisation’ to show how this distribution of responsibilities within novel ‘decision chains’ raises critical questions for public law.