Deliberative Politics in Street-level Data Collection

• In Event: Becoming “Data-Driven”: Burgeoning Data Cultures and Liminality in Civil Service - I

Abstract

The use of performance metrics in public administration energize promises of efficiency gains. But as Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars show, data, metrics, and standards of all form may obscure certain forms of knowledge exchange and political interactions. In this paper, I examine the interplay between the practices of assembling performance metrics and principles of deliberative democracy. I seek to understand practices of data collection as home to various forms of deliberation and domination. Through a multi-sited ethnography of street-level data-collection in the largest agri-environmental program in the US, I observed how street-level bureaucrats work with farmers to collect farm information and fit the information into a numerical and multiple choice form. The inputted information is then processed by an algorithm to produce a ranking score that determines final spending. With as much as $40,000 per year available to every farmer, the stakes are high. The algorithm certainly leaves little room for deliberation. However, drawing on Ethnomethodological studies of work, I show that the practices of transforming a verbal exchange with a farmer into a data-set entails interpretation and improvisation on part of the official. Collected data is necessarily plural, but I also found that officials had ways to account for their answers. By centralizing the accountability arenas inhabited by street-level bureaucrats, I propose rethinking how we make sense of the everyday politics of data-driven governance and its relation to deliberative politics.

Author

• Ritwick Ghosh, New York University