Automated decision-making and good administration: Views from inside the government machinery
基于对丹麦43位公共行政关键利益相关者的访谈，分析了自动化行政决策与良好行政的关系，识别出六项相关价值，并指出风险与机遇并存，需务实看待。
Use of semi- and fully automated, administrative decision-making in public administration is increasing. Despite this increase, few studies have explicitly analysed its relation to good administration. Good administration is regulations and norms aimed at securing the correctness of administrative decisions as well as the legitimacy of these and is often associated with underlying values such as transparency, equality of treatment and accountability. Based on a thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with 43 key public administration stakeholders in a wide array of policy areas in Denmark, insiders of government machinery are shown to perceive relations between automated decision-making and good administration as manifold. Automated, administrative decision-making is articulated as providing both opportunities for supporting good administration and undermining good administration. Six values of good administration particularly related to automated, administrative decision-making are identified: Carefulness; Respecting-individual-rights; Professionalism; Trustworthiness; Responsiveness and Empowerment. Put simply, risks to good administration can be expected to occur if administrative bodies apply automated, administrative decision-making, while opportunities must be actively nurtured through managerial attention. Despite popular conceptions of the threat of “robotic government”, the conclusions of this study indicate a need for a more pragmatic view of relations of automated, administrative decision-making and good administration balanced between outright techno-optimism and techno-pessimism.