Abstract
Street-level bureaucracy literature ascertains that policies get made not only in the offices of legislatures or politicians but through the discretion bureaucrats employ in their day-to-day interactions with citizens in government agencies. The discretion bureaucrats use to grant access to public benefits or impose sanctions adds up to what the public ultimately experience as the government and its policies. This perspective, however, overlooks policy-making that gets done in the back offices of government, where there might not be direct interaction with citizens. Furthermore, it treats discretion as inherently anthropogenic and ignores that it is exercised in relation to sociotechnical arrangements of which bureaucrats are a part. In this paper, based on extensive ethnography at national statistical institutes and international statistical meetings across Europe, I make two arguments. The first is that, statisticians emerge as back-office policy-makers as they are compelled to take multiple methodological decisions when operationalizing abstract statistical guidelines and definitions, thus effectively making rather than merely implementing policies. This is the “discretion” they employ, even when they may not interact with citizens. The second argument is that the exercise of discretion is sociotechnical, that is, it happens in relation to the constraints and affordances of technologies and the decisions of other bureaucrats in their institutions and others.
Highlights
The definition of population is a complex matter
We find a variety of diverging practices in European Union (EU) member states, such as setting different time frames for measuring temporary absence or usual residence or interpreting “intention” to stay, due to reasons of data availability or national laws and regulations that draw the boundaries of residency
Another statistician from Statistics Norway stressed the potential cost of including asylum-seekers in the population and noted that it would be “overwhelming” and “not productive” given the limited resources of statistical offices.16. He added that this is why strict compliance with the usually resident population” (URP) definition was not feasible for Norway: it would be too expensive to make these changes to the way the population registration is done and the registers kept, especially given the small number of asylum-seekers.17. This example illustrates that discretion is exercised in relation to the counting of asylum-seekers involves the interplay between a technology—the personal identification numbers (PINs)—which is implemented by a government agency other than the national statistical institutes (NSIs) (i.e., UDI) and statisticians and UDI bureaucrats
Summary
The definition of population is a complex matter. In statistics, the definition of population establishes the basis for who is to be included or excluded in an enumeration. The first is that, when operationalizing abstract international statistical guidelines, definitions, and categories in relation to national rules and conventions, statisticians engage in important negotiations with other organizations and agencies that are involved in producing population data for policy-making. Methods—and the sociotechnical arrangements of which they are part— are sites where certain accounts and enactments of the world come to be contested, negotiated, and competed over (Ruppert 2012) This is my third critique of the conceptualization of discretion in the street-level bureaucracy literature: by focusing on individual decision-making, it ignores the sociotechnical arrangements of which bureaucrats and their institutions are a part and thereby ignores how the constraints and affordances of these arrangements come to shape how discretion is exercised. The first is that statisticians emerge as back-office policy-makers when they operationalize abstract international statistical guidelines, definitions, and methods in relation to their national contexts; the second is that discretion needs to be reconceptualized as sociotechnical. I will look at three particular moments of interpretation and adaptation that takes place: (1) methods for establishing residency, (2) establishing time criteria for residency, and (3) establishing “intention” for (continued) residency
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