Algorithmic Welfare and Digital Social Assistance: Eligibility, Social Sorting, and the Politics of Deservingness

Abstract

Digital welfare has become a major feature of contemporary social assistance as governments increasingly use registries, digital identification, and automated eligibility tools to manage access to benefits. This transformation matters because welfare is no longer administered only through visible bureaucratic judgment, but through data infrastructures that classify households and shape who remains legible to the state. The purpose of this article is to examine how algorithmic welfare reorganizes eligibility, deservingness, and social sorting in digital social assistance systems. The article adopts a qualitative and theory-driven approach informed by classification studies, street-level bureaucracy, administrative burden, and algorithmic governance. It draws on policy documents, welfare regulations, digital governance reports, institutional materials, and scholarly literature related to automated eligibility, verification systems, and social assistance administration. Analytical attention is directed to infrastructural classification, redistributed discretion, verification asymmetry, and the moral economy of deservingness. A comparative interpretive reading is used to clarify how digital welfare systems shape inclusion, exclusion, and correction pathways beyond technical claims of efficiency. Eligibility emerges as a data-dependent and politically mediated process in which digital systems intensify administrative burden and stratify access through categories of risk, stability, and credibility. Algorithmic welfare therefore transforms social assistance not simply by modernizing delivery, but by embedding normative judgments within infrastructures of classification and verification. The article contributes to the field by offering an integrated sociological framework for understanding how digital social assistance reshapes welfare justice, institutional accountability, and the politics of eligibility.