How can national variations in levels of public sector digitalisation be explained? This is the question at the heart of the research project “Digital Welfare”, which is funded by a Minerva Fast-Track Fellowship of the Max Planck Society. While current debates on digitalisation often focus on the future, this project looks back in history and examines possible historical explanations for country-specific differences in the digitalisation of public administrations. The focus of the study is on digitalisation in the welfare state, in particular the transformation of welfare administrations since the 1970s. The project aims to demonstrate that current debates on public-sector digitalisation can benefit from a historical and comparative perspective. Within the context of the project, digitalisation is understood as a technological, legal and socio-political process. For this reason, the project will examine both legal-institutional changes and socio-political discourses concerning digitalisation. The focus on digitalisation in the welfare state can be explained by the fact that the fundamental tensions and challenges of digitalisation are particularly visible in the welfare state context - for example, in relation to (social) data protection, but also with regard to communication in the citizen-state relationship. The project focuses primarily on the two major pillars of the welfare state: old-age provision and health care. The study takes a historical-comparative approach and looks at Germany, Denmark and the United Kingdom, three countries with very different structural, institutional and socio-cultural frameworks and which have undergone very different processes of digitalisation since the 1970s.
The intended output is a book containing the project’s main research findings. In addition, the aim is to publish a peer-reviewed journal article comparing government-level visions and narrations of public sector digitalisation in the 1990s.