A theory of the infrastructure-level bureaucracy: Understanding the consequences of data-exchange for procedural justice, organizational decision-making, and data itself

The interconnectedness of government organizations through data-exchange is proliferating. This is relevant for many debates in public administration today since all applications of data-driven government rest on a foundation of data. In this article, rather than focusing on specific applications, we analyze the way supra-organizational data-exchange shapes such applications and specifically automated administrative decision-making (AADM). We argue that the whole of bureaucracy that is connected through data-exchange implies the organizational separation of the collection or gathering of government data from the exchange, modification, combination and/or analysis and subsequently its (re)use in decision-making processes. To analyze the consequences of this new division of labor we further develop the concept of the infrastructure-level bureaucracy and formulate hypotheses on its consequences for data itself, organizations, and citizens. Ultimately, we argue infrastructural information flows pose challenges for democratic control and for procedural lawfulness in the constitutional state. • Many problems in contemporary digital government can be traced back to organization of information flows. • Data-exchange rather than the design of individual government applications can best explain the loss of procedural justice. • Loss of capacity for democratic control of data-exchange is best observed on the level of the information infrastructure. • We formulate hypotheses on affordances and limitations of information infrastructures for data, organizations and citizens.