Digital Social State: Peculiarities of Functioning in the Context of European Integration

The ever-increasing use of information and communication technologies in new areas is resulting in fundamental changes in the social life of modern states. While digitalization processes began in the economy, they quickly flowed into the public sphere, giving rise to the concepts of the information society and the digital state, in which public affairs, administration, and political decision-making are carried out with the help of information technology. The basic principles of the digital state are the following: no barriers to the information flow; putting people at the center of the state’s attention, ensuring a comprehensive solution to their problems; transparency of public authorities and the possibility of citizens’ participation in decision-making processes; respect for citizens’ right to privacy. The intersection of social policy and digitalization is a crucial aspect of modern governance and social development. Social policy refers to government initiatives and interventions aimed at improving the well-being of citizens, addressing issues such as healthcare, education, unemployment, and poverty. Digitalization, on the other hand, involves the integration of digital technologies into various aspects of society, including communication, economics, and governance. The implementation of digitalization in the most important areas of state responsibility fosters the gradual transformation of the welfare or social state.1 Today, many governments are transforming the welfare state into a digitalized form to automate eligibility assessments, benefit calculations, fraud detection, and risk assessment. The welfare state seeks to make citizens economically motivated, competitive, flexible, active, and responsible instead of trying to protect them from cycles of accumulation and market crises1. The digitalization of the welfare state is also accompanied by the decentralization of social policy and the transfer to the municipal level of responsibility for youth care, social security, and care for the chronically ill and elderly. This step is intended to bring state social assistance closer to the population, as well as to make it more efficient and cheaper. The transformation of the social welfare state into a digital welfare state generates new social risks, such as systemic errors; discrimination; exclusion and inequality in access to social security, resulting from data leaks faced by citizens; the creation of new forms of data-driven control instead of adequate service delivery within social policy; and the negligence of automation and data processing in social policy, which sometimes leads to numerous false accusations of fraud and, consequently, deprivation of benefits. As a result, the use of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, semi-automated algorithmic systems, and automated decision support to reduce welfare fraud is currently being criticized.2 In the context of European integration, in particular within the European Union, the issue of the digital social state is one of the key ones and can be considered as an integral part of both European social policy and digitalization policy. The documents adopted by the European Union in various spheres of cooperation, which in one way or another address social issues, indicate that today the integration organization is a flagship in shaping the model of relations between the individual and the state in the social sphere in the context of active digitalization.