How do unemployed benefit recipients experience digitalized welfare encounters and the coping tactics they adopt? This the question that Margot Kersing, the centre for BOLD Cities alumnus and current assistant professor at VU, former academic director Liesbet van Zoonen, Lieke Oldenhof, associate professor at the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management (EHSPM) and Kim Putters, chairman of the SER investigate in their newest publicationThief or toddler: Experiences of unemployed benefit
recipients in the Dutch digital welfare state.
Abstract
While data-driven systems play an increasingly important role in the digitalization of welfare provision, responsible implementation remains a challenge. Concerns raised by various societal actors indicate insufficient attention to the impact of data-driven welfare provision on citizens’ lives. This research explores the experiences and coping tactics of unemployed benefit recipients with data-driven welfare provision in the domain of work and income in the Netherlands. We used a multiple method design consisting of interviews with benefit recipients, their representatives, and service providers, and a document analysis of experience-based stories of benefit recipients and letters by the municipality. Our findings show that benefit recipients feel treated like a thief or a toddler and experience an unequal power balance in their relationship with the municipality. This unequal power balance is complicated by the increasing digitalization of welfare provision encounters because it induces a new dynamic of mutual distrust. Benefit recipients use different coping tactics to counter the unequal power balance. Negotiations about the values and ideologies that are embedded in data-driven welfare provision systems became visible through four coping tactics benefit recipients use to deal with the data hunger of their municipality: (a) pleasing, (b) fighting, (c) withdrawing, and (d) calling in auxiliaries. The implementation of data-driven systems in welfare provision results in emotional and administrative burdens for benefit recipients, and inefficient and expensive data-driven welfare provision for municipalities.
The full chapter is accessible through the link below.
A visual summary of the publication with illustrations of Margriet Osinga is additionally available.
Kersing, M., Oldenhof, L., Putters, K. and Van Zoonen, L. (2025) Thief or Toddler: Experiences of unemployed benefit recipients in the Dutch digital welfare state. In Galis, V. and Vlassis, V-S. (Eds.), Digitalization, Data and Welfare: Sociotechnical Approaches to Service Delivery. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. ISBN - 978 1 0353 3814 6
