Everyday Legitimacy Practices and the Algorithmic Turn in the Administrative State

Amina A. Abdu, Abigail Z. Jacobs

Abstract: By operationalizing how public policy is enacted, government algorithms play a key role of public administration – a role traditionally occupied in the U.S. by the wide range of bureaucrats and agency experts that comprise the administrative state. At stake is not just the functioning of these agencies but their perceived legitimacy, which has long been a subject of debate. While scholarship has drawn attention to the ways that agency algorithms can bolster (and undermine) legitimacy, this neglects the way that legitimacy is performed and negotiated. Focusing on the use of algorithms within federal agencies, we argue that agencies’ everyday legitimacy practices are a crucial site where the meaning of administrative legitimacy is negotiated. Through their routine operations, agencies shape the role of the administrative state by embracing certain tactics to defend their authority and autonomy from external intervention. The adoption of algorithms in agency operations marks an important site of negotiation, revealing a shift in what makes agency authority legitimate in the eyes of the state. Drawing on over fifty years of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports, we empirically examine how algorithms reshape the values, goals, and logics of legitimacy. By systematically examining GAO’s everyday legitimacy practices, we demonstrate that the algorithmic turn within government agencies is not new, but part of a longer history of quantification. We show how the history of bureaucratic quantification, including the adoption of algorithms, has changed how administrative legitimacy is understood and performed across the government, with value-laden consequences.