Towards a platformised welfare state? How public administration, personal data, and third-sector welfare get entangled in a nation-wide digitalisation project

Abstract

In the era of digital governance, the concept of Government as a Platform (GaaP) has gained significant attention. This article studies the implementation of this concept, taking the German Social Service Platform’ as a case study. The catalyst for the development of this public platform has been the German Online Access Act (Online-Zugangs-Gesetz or OZG), which marks a pivotal moment in the country’s government digitalization efforts. Employing the analytical toolkit of the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), the article studies the sociotechnical processes shaping the evolution of this platform. It provides a thick description of the dynamics of translating generic ideas into an already existing landscape of institutions and technologies and explores how, through the actors’ interpretations, their negotiations, and their interactions with technologies, both ideas of traditional welfare governance (subsidiarity, welfare pluralism, and executive federalism) and ideas related to the platform concept (agility, user-centered design, once-only) are continuously redefined throughout the process.