Navigating digital welfare: A multi‐level maze?

Greater conceptual and empirical engagement with welfare state complexity is needed in studies of digital welfare. This article explores how existing concepts such as welfare systems, subsidiarisation, rescaling and fragmentation can advance our understanding of claimants' digital welfare experiences. Focussing on the United Kingdom—well-known for its digital welfare approach to Universal Credit—the article demonstrates the need for scholars to look beyond single digital reforms. It draws on empirical data from the Navigating Digital Welfare project to explore experiences of digital welfare from the perspective of claimants in multi-level welfare systems who engage with multiple ‘modes of digitalisation’ and competing digitally mediated citizen–state relations. The research finds that multi-level welfare creates a complex and unsettling digital welfare experience for individuals who can access multiple types of social security and engage with multiple unpredictable interfaces, possess limited understanding of the links between different agencies and data sharing and experience frequent difficulties accessing human contacts. This context has the potential to create heightened inequalities due to multiple administrative burdens which can lead to underclaiming, misinformation or an inability to access services.