Automated, Administrative Decision-making and Good Administration: Friends, Foes or Complete Strangers?

In his thesis, PhD Fellow, Ulrik B. U. Røhl, explores the relations between increasing use of automated, administrative decision-making by public authorities and internationally accepted regulations, norms and values of good administration.

Drawing on the disciplines of Public Administration, Law, Information Systems, and Science and Technology Studies, as well as empirical data from Denmark, he sets out to explore if automated, administrative decision-making and good administration are friends, foes or complete strangers. The thesis serves as a microcosm of ongoing social and ethical debates regarding use, potentials and regulation of increasingly advanced technologies in modern society.

The thesis concludes that relations between usage of automated, administrative decision-making and good administration are widespread and tend to be particularly complex regarding the underlying values of responsiveness, accountability and fairness. Use of automated, administrative decision-making is further found to both support and undermine good administration indicating that such use is rarely a “silver bullet” that supports all values of good administration at the same time.