Organised by the Swedish Network on Automated Decision-Making in the Public Sector.

The turn to data-driven approaches within public administration to inform (and even to automate) public sector decision-making can be understood as an emerging movement that I call the ‘New Public Analytics’ (‘NPA’). Central to the New Public Analytics is the turn to digital automation and the use of ‘data analytics,’ a form of computational analysis that has its theoretical foundations in data science and statistics, involving the application of software algorithms (including but not limited to machine learning algorithms) to large data sets in order to identify patterns and correlations in the data capable of generating ‘actionable’ insight.

In this talk, I will offer a brief overview of the basic logics and features of this emerging paradigm. I will then compare NPA with its predecessor, the New Public Management ('NPM'). In particular, I will trace the evolution of NPM through the rise of risk analysis and risk management in public administration towards the emergence of this new paradigm. In so doing, I will argue that NPA can be understood as qualitatively different and distinct from NPM, despite considerable continuity. Finally, I will argue that although recent scholarship has appropriately highlighted the importance of attending to the political dimensions of the rise of the digitisation and datafication in the public sector, we must also attend to their constitutional implications and which have not yet received the sustained interrogation which I believe is both necessary and urgent.