Governments seem to be struggling in a high-tech and at the same time fragmenting society. Think, for example, of the Child Care Benefit Scandal in the Netherlands. In this special issue the central question is “Can governments still get things done?” Different paradigms can be distinguished around government and governance: bureaucracy, new public management and public value. In studying the central question, three perspectives are distinguished: macro, meso and micro. The different contributions to this special issue cover various phases in the policy process. This special issue shows a shift from general arrangements to tailor-made solutions and from screen bureaucracy to a more human-sized approach. It also illustrates the importance of recognizing system characteristics in cases of policy failure.

In recent years, there have been multiple policy fiascos (large-scale policy failures) in the digitalized enforcement of social security across welfare states. Besides similarities in outcomes, these cases have exposed far-reaching consequences of ‘rule of law system weaknesses’ in the form of deficits in parliamentary and judicial control. While there has been increasing attention for the vulnerability of benefit recipients in the digital welfare state, the importance of parliamentary and judicial control and the problematic nature of deficits in these control mechanisms has remained largely overlooked. This article takes a first step towards an understanding of this issue. It (a) examines the linkages between parliamentary and judicial control and policy failure and (b) analyses the role of deficits in these control mechanisms in the Dutch childcare benefits scandal. The results demonstrate the combined relevance of a variety of control deficits related to the legislative process, parliamentary scrutiny and judicial review. Moreover, interdependencies between parliamentary and judicial control highlight the importance of holistically analysing their combined influence. All in all, the article facilitates a deeper understanding of system failure in the digital welfare state and provides recommendations for future research.

The childcare benefits affair refers to a period between 2005 and 2019 in which an estimated 30,000 families were deliberately put into serious financial and personal harm by the tax administration because of often unjustified suspicions of fraudulent behaviour. Inquiries into the political and administrative causes and consequences led to a restructuring of the tax administration and the resignation of the cabinet at the beginning of 2021. By reconstructing the affair, we analyse what role politics and politicians played and how they attempted to avoid blame for the affair. Several strategies were used to avoid blame, including tasking a committee to write a report, restructuring the tax administration and promising swift compensation to the victims. The only party that seems to have avoided blame is parliament, despite multiple indications that members of parliament played an important role in the emergence of the affair.

In the Netherlands, organizations tasked with investigating and sanctioning social security fraud often use algorithmic profiling technologies. Despite the potential benefits, such technologies are not immune to risks, such as discrimination. A lack of clarity in the translation of non-discrimination legislation into practice entails that organizations are tasked with engaging and operationalizing this legislation ex-ante through the identification and mitigation of risks of discrimination. This paper explores the question: How does the use of algorithmic profiling technologies lead to discrimination and can social security organizations mitigate these risks? In order to answer this question, the theoretical framework of the algorithmic lifecycle is used to identify risks of discrimination in the design, implementation, and use of algorithmic profiling technologies. In particular, semi-structured interviews with experts and the Dutch Childcare Benefits Scandal case are used to identify risks of discrimination and examine how they interact to produce discriminatory outcomes in practice. The findings demonstrate that discrimination is the result of a complex interaction of unmitigated risks throughout the algorithmic lifecycle of profiling technologies. This highlights the importance of taking a lifecycle approach to the identification and mitigation of risks of discrimination.

Increasingly, Western governments need not only get things done, but get things done well. In this regard, equality and human rights standards provide a significant framework for governments to improve the quality of their performance. Regulators, inspectorates and ombuds (RIOs) are particularly important in this regard as they are in a privileged position to monitor and assess the implementation of equality and human rights standards by governments. However, as yet, the performance of RIOs has been underwhelming. To investigate this underperformance, this article explores the legal consciousness (i.e. understandings and perceptions of the law) of the individuals responsible for the implementation of equality and human rights laws within a sample of RIOs in England and Wales. Two different types of legal consciousness are identified: law as sacrosanct and law as malleable. The article then explores how these different types of legal consciousness influence implementation. It concludes by highlighting factors that influence an individual’s legal consciousness and ways that these can be enhanced to improve the quality of implementation in the future.

The central objective of this article is to examine the difficulties around getting rid of the practice of patients providing informal ‘gratitude’ payments to doctors in the Hungarian state-funded healthcare context. In many cases, the patients’ requirement to pay to access supposedly free services is communicated as a demand from the doctors’ side, which challenges the notion of ‘gratitude’. The Hungarian governments’ methods of tackling the elimination of these informal payments can be regarded as an ongoing policy fiasco, which continues to affect the healthcare system and its lay users, producing inequalities in access and in the quality of services. This article is based on twenty-eight in-depth interviews and three focus groups conducted between February 2017 and March 2019 in Budapest. The article examines how doctors and patients experience state law, as well as what they experience as law (including non-state norms), to explore the research problem through the lens of legal consciousness.

Feedback loops may be critical components for a learning system, such as the legal aid system in The Netherlands. They, however, are not ubiquitous in the broader domain of access to justice. This paper explores how such feedback loops can help governments to get things done by making systems like the legal aid system evidence-based. The paper explores the potential on the basis of the approach and data from a monitoring and evaluation study of the temporary Arrangement Advice Certificate Self-Efficacy.

In recent years, indications emerged that the assumption of self-efficacy in the Dutch Legal Aid Law might have been an impediment for accessing subsidised legal aid for citizens who suffered from the childcare benefits situation. The temporary Arrangement Advice Certificate Self-efficacy envisages to fix this potential flaw. The example shows how insights in the people using the arrangement, their legal problems and situations, the nature and effectiveness of interventions under the arrangement, and the experiences of people and the professionals helping them, can inform changes in policy.