10 oktober 2003 kl 13.15 - Isabell Schierenbeck, statsvetenskap Bakom välfärdsstatens dörrar

Abstract:

The welfare state and its institutions have featured considerable change during the last decade. Increasingly, systems of implementation have become goal-oriented, rather than regulated in detail. Welfare state programs have moved towards mean testing systems, rather than general systems. The recent trends leave the individual front-line bureaucrats with decidedly more discretion in the implementation process. At the same time immigrants’ have become one of the larger target groups of welfare state institutions. Welfare state bureaucracies, responsible for newly arrived immigrants, have an impact on the immigrants’ route into the new society, for instance the labour market. The topic of this study is whether bureaucratic discretion favours the integration of immigrants into the broader society.
I argue that the concept of discretion is insufficiently problemized theoretically, and ought to be viewed as a neutral concept. There is a tendency to apply the concept in a normative way, where discretion is regarded as something positive per se. Such approaches undermine the importance of legitimacy, especially in the case of welfare state agencies. The legitimacy of the welfare state is based on the very fact that individuals have the right to equal treatment in the encounter with different welfare state institutions. In front-line bureaucracies the legitimacy is ideally based on the professionalism of the bureaucrat, and the possibility to take the individual clients’ special needs, conditions and demands into consideration. However, if the clients and bureaucrats do not share the basic understandings or values the legitimacy will easily erode.
The study elaborates on three dimensions regarding the front-line bureaucrats’ use of the discretion given them; 1) in relation to the regulatory system, 2) the complex role of the front-line bureaucrat as a representative of both the client and the organisation, and 3) the clients’ immigrant background. The study has a comparative design between the Swedish and Israeli bureaucracies responsible for the immigrants during their first period in the new country. Both countries have advanced welfare state programs conducted to ease the integration of immigrants. In the Israeli case immigrants find their way into the labour market within a few years, while in Sweden immigrants are more or less excluded from the labour market despite a longer period in the country.
The results show a great difference in the discretion applied by the front-line bureaucrats in the Israeli and Swedish case. Both the Israeli and Swedish front-line bureaucrats tend to view the immigrants so-called cultural attributes; costumes, values, life style and religion; negatively. But while the Swedish bureaucrats widely apply the discretion afforded them, the Israeli bureaucrats’ use of the same discretion is more limited. Hence, the intolerance towards the immigrant clients’ find it’s way through the Swedish bureaucracy, while it is obstructed in the Israeli case.
As a result we ought to put greater value on the use of discretion as part of the implementation process, and its correlation with the outcome of a certain policy. Discretion plays an utterly important role in front-line bureaucracies and the encounter between the representative of the welfare state and the client, and further research has to elaborate on how the use of discretion can be combined with a legitimate public administration, equal to all citizens independent of cultural or ethnical background.