The Kafka Brigade Foundation
The Kafka Brigade Foundation is a network of researchers and research teams that share a common purpose. That bureaucracy should be shaped to serve the most uncontested and fundamental values of liberal democracy - integrity, transparency, accountability, justice, rationality, proportionality and the protection of civil rights for each individual. That bureaucracy should be effective in creating the public value for which the institution is established. That it should be efficient and effective for the individual. And for each individual, because the law is equal for all.
Our purpose is to find those instances where bureaucracy does not create the public value intended, where institutional arrangements are improvident, where effectiveness is not monitored, or where indifference is produced unchecked. When a bureaucracy's demands serve no purpose for the citizen or the public at large, it becomes a form of oppression. When red tape does not yield result, only serves the organisation itself, or can be imposed unconstrained, rule of law can easily turn into arbitrariness. When rules and procedures become incomprehensible, complex beyond the individuals abilities or time-consuming beyond reason, freedom is lost. When automation becomes a lever to flood a citizen with registration demands, bureaucracy becomes terror, where it should be a protection for each of us.
The Kafka Brigade Foundation aims to create the conditions to address the dysfunctions in bureaucracies and bring the public into existence to demand this. Therefore, we seek to understand what bureaucratic dysfunction is, what its causes are and how to create the conditions for change. Our goal is to create knowledge, to act on it, and to trigger informed action. The Kafka Brigade Foundation operates independently but cooperates with other researchers or research organisations to enforce and complement each other’s effectiveness in this joint special purpose.
A theory of the infrastructure-level bureaucracy: Understanding the consequences of data-exchange for procedural justice, organizational decision-making, and data itself
Widlak, A.C. & Peeters, R. (2025) Government Information Quarterly Vol 42, Issue 2, June 2025, 102021
Highlights
- Many problems in contemporary digital government can be traced back to organization of information flows.
- Data-exchange rather than the design of individual government applications can best explain the loss of procedural justice.
- Loss of capacity for democratic control of data-exchange is best observed on the level of the information infrastructure.
- We formulate hypotheses on affordances and limitations of information infrastructures for data, organizations and citizens.
Abstract
The interconnectedness of government organizations through data-exchange is proliferating. This is relevant for many debates in public administration today since all applications of data-driven government rest on a foundation of data. In this article, rather than focusing on specific applications, we analyze the way supra-organizational data-exchange shapes such applications and specifically automated administrative decision-making (AADM). We argue that the whole of bureaucracy that is connected through data-exchange implies the organizational separation of the collection or gathering of government data from the exchange, modification, combination and/or analysis and subsequently its (re)use in decision-making processes. To analyze the consequences of this new division of labor we further develop the concept of the infrastructure-level bureaucracy and formulate hypotheses on its consequences for data itself, organizations, and citizens. Ultimately, we argue infrastructural information flows pose challenges for democratic control and for procedural lawfulness in the constitutional state.
Award for best scientific publication by a non-academic
Louis Brownlow Award for "Administrative Exclusion in the Infrastructure-level Bureaucracy"
In 2023, Rik Peeters and Arjan Widlak published a scientific article in Public Administration Review. In it, they explore a broader understanding of how administrative exclusion and administrative burdens arise. They do this using (part of) the childcare benefit scandal as a case study and considering technology as an institutional factor, particularly data exchange. They introduce the concept of the "infrastructure-level bureaucracy", the entire network of organizations connected through data exchange. This information infrastructure has its own characteristics that make it susceptible to exclusion mechanisms. The separation between data collection and use leads to unpredictability and a lack of accountability. The article also aimed to challenge the dominant view that administrative burdens are always political, but politics by other means. However, the lack of insight and overview of the data infrastructure alone proved insufficient to explain the outcomes in the childcare benefit scandal. Although it can lead to governments no longer being able to follow the reasoning behind their own decisions. The established explanation of political intent was also necessary to explain the outcomes in this part of the childcare benefit scandal. The report by the parliamentary interrogation committee, more than a year after publication, has substantiated that point with much more source material.
The article won the Louis Brownlow Award last month for the best article in Public Administration Review written by a practitioner.
Burdens on the Gateway to the State: The Construction of Administrative Burdens in the Registration of People Experiencing Homelessness in Belgium and the Netherlands
Research article in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
Abstract
Population registries are the gateway to public services, benefits, and rights. However, despite clear formal rules and procedures, people eligible for registration may still face administrative burdens in obtaining access. In this article, we study the case of the municipal registration of people who experience homelessness in Belgium and the Netherlands—a group that typically suffers from administrative vulnerability. Using data from 61 interviews with social workers and civil servants, we find that burdens are constructed at the municipal level to disincentivize homeless people's access to registration. However, using the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, we also identify mechanisms in the governance of population registrations and the decentralization of social policies that create incentives for strategic behavior by municipal policy makers and street-level bureaucrats. By analyzing the interaction between multiple institutional levels, we contribute to understanding how structural mechanisms influence policymakers’ agency in the construction of administrative burdens.
Robben, L.-l., Peeters, R., & Widlak, A. (2024). Burdens on the gateway to the state: Administrative burdens in the registration of people experiencing homelessness in Belgium and the Netherlands. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22598
Webinar on the use of black lists in combination with ADM
Coming up: Marlies van Eck and Arjan Widlak are organizing a webinar on the use of black lists in combination with Automated Decision Making in the Dutch Tax Administration
You may have heard last years news that one branch of the Dutch Tax Administration used profiles to combat fraud. These profiles led to severe consequences for people with child care benefits. After this affair members of the Parliament asked for in dept independent research on the rest of the Tax Administration, leading to -again- disturbing findings. We learned about “FSV”.
Do you want to know more? And perhaps request a personal invitation for the webinar?