By operationalizing how public policy is enacted, government algorithms play a key role of public administration —a role traditionally occupied in the United States 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 50 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 legitimacy practices, we show how the history of bureaucratic quantification, which we argue includes the adoption of algorithms, has changed how administrative legitimacy is understood and performed across the government, with value-laden consequences.
Abdu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.