When Corporatism still matters -Investigating the role of social partners in the decision-making process of an algorithmic system

In recent years, the literature on the implementation of so-called algorithmic decision-making systems (ADM systems) has been growing constantly. Basically two strands dominate the scientific literature: First, many scholars concentrate on the technical aspects of the ADMs, first and foremost discussing design questions such as fairness and quality measures that need to be taken into consideration when implementing an ADM system into societal contexts. Scholars that fall into the second strand, mainly concentrate on the societal consequences and ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Consequently, we already gained a good knowledge on the technical and ethical implications of ADM systems. Compared to this, studies that concentrate on the “policymaking sphere” (König/Wenzelburger, 2020) are still rare. This paper aims to address this shortcoming by presenting a case study on the political decision-making process which led to the adoption of the Austrian ADM system ‘AMAS’. It is designed to profile job seekers in the Austrian employment service (AMS) and hereby assist street level bureaucrats in their everyday work (Holl et al., 2018). Austria is a particularly intriguing case, as its policy-making process has been characterized by an important role of social partners, in what has been termed “Austro-corporatism”. While some scholars have found a declining significance of corporatism since the 1990s (Eichhorst/ Weishaupt, 2013), others state that corporatism in Austria has indeed changed but still matters in core areas of policymaking (Pernicka/Glassner 2014). Adding to this debate, this paper shows that in the case of ‘AMAS’, the social partners still hold core positions in political decision-making processes and still have the ability to intervene in cases where their interests are not met. The insights, the author gained during her close reading of primary source material and through data from 12 qualitative expert interviews with politicians, representatives of the social partners, high level bureaucrats at the AMS, illuminate the (1) the different perspectives of key actors on the use of artificial intelligence within the political system of Austria and (2) allow us, to evaluate to what extent corporatism is still an important feature of the policy-making process in Austria. The paper is structured as follows. In the next section, the state-of-the-art on the use of ADMs in public administration will be discussed. This is then related to the debate of Austro-Corporatism and the argument that social partnership still matters. The case study will be presented and discussed in the third section, followed by the conclusion in the final section. References Eichhorst, W and Weishaupt, J.T (2013) Mit Neo-Korporatismus durch die Krise? Die Rolle des Sozialen Dialogs in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. IZA Discussion Paper No. 7498. Holl J, Kernbeiß G and Wagner-Pinter M (2018) Das AMS-Arbeitsmarktchancen-Modell. Wien: Synthesisforschung GmbH. König PD and Wenzelburger G (2020) Opportunity for renewal or disruptive force? How artificial intelligence alters democratic politics. Government Information Quarterly 37(3): 101489. Pernicka, S and Glassner, V (2014) Transnational strategies of trade unions towards wage policy. A neo-institutional framework. European Journal ofIndustrial Relations, Vol. 20(4), 317–334.