From evidence-based to techno-guarantees-based policy: The European framing of digital contact tracing apps

Despite not having clear scientific evidence of their effectiveness, several countries developed Digital Contact Tracing (DCT) apps throughout 2020 to slow down the spread of COVID-19. European institutions decided to encourage a common decentralized approach that could foster interoperability between the national apps. This work investigates to what degree did evidence about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 apps played a role in the policy framing of DCT at the European level. In this paper, we investigated the policy framing process on DCT, through a dataset of 93 official documents that contributed to the policy framing of such technologies. We employed a dictionary-based and co-occurrence automated text analysis to understand to what degree a discourse on the evidence of apps’ effectiveness was present, and we compared it with other discourses that played an important role in the framing process. We found that two distinct – but deeply intertwined – discourses focused on guarantees in terms of human rights and on technical aspects of the COVID-19 apps widely prevailed over the issue of effectiveness. We also found that the two prevailing discourses were deeply intertwined in the framing of DCT. Based on our empirical results, we argue that the “techno-guarantees” discourse was decisive in the policy framing of DCT at the European level. Therefore, the policy framing of DCT should be considered more techno-guarantees-based than evidence-based. We conclude by addressing the necessity of further research to understand if the techno-guarantees discourse is present in the policy framing process when emerging technologies are at the core of the policy response.