Varieties of Delegation: The Effects of Outsourcing Social Services on the Democratic Accountability of Service Providers

In the face of growing labour market inequalities, governments have rhetorically seized on the social investment approach to welfare: improving human capital and skills should help more people find better jobs and greater economic prosperity. One element of this approach is the focus on investing in skills training and employment support for people who are unemployed and underemployed. The extent to which these efforts actually reach those most in-need, however, is determined not only by state decision makers and expenditure levels, but also by the range of non-profit and for-profit organizations who have the delegated authority to determine people’s access to services. In this paper, I analyze the implications of delegating access to training services for people who are unemployed or unemployed. Drawing on fieldwork from three countries and the growing literature examining what Morgan and Campbell call delegated welfare states, I discuss how the organization of delegated services affects whether services are offered to individuals who are often marginalized from labour markets (new migrants, women, people with less formal education, people of color, and people with long unemployment spells). I analyze how different ways of organizing delegated services affect whether service providers are held accountable for ensuring their services are inclusive and accessible to those furthest from the labour market. I argue that the forms of control exercised by governments over delegated service providers have downstream effects over whether service providers understand themselves as accountable to their clients (as citizens and voters) and so responsible for ensuring equal treatment to their clients under democratic norms. In a sense, this work test Zacka’s (2017) claim that contracted service providers understand themselves as bureaucratic agents of the state. By comparing the organization of training services in the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States, I discuss how variations in how government agencies oversee delegated providers affect the actions of providers. I show how contracting arrangements affect whether providers consider equality of access to services as an important principle informing their participant selection processes. Providers that have closer ties to bureaucratic agencies, as a result of their contracting arrangements, are more likely to consider fairness as a factor when enrolling people in their programs and services. This has flow-on effects to democratic participation more broadly: the allocation of training services affects who is able to gain access to full social and economic participation in a democratic society (Marshall, 1950; Soss 2002). At its core, the delegation of bureaucratic tasks to third parties places more layers of administration between elected officials and policy implementation. Some scholars have argued that delegation is likely to deepen existing social inequalities (Michener, 2019). My work assesses this claim using extensive interviews with policymakers and service providers across three countries to discuss the relationship between delegated service provision and democratic equality and accountability.