The Contactless State: Anxiety, Overburdening, and Uncertainty in Citizen’s Experiences with the Digital State in Spain and Italy

Over the past two decades, governments across Europe have launched extensive programmes of digital transformation. A key aim of these reforms has been the shift from paper-based and face-to-face interactions to digitally mediated models, allowing administrative processes to be handled remotely and efficiently, thereby enhancing states’ output legitimacy. Yet beneath this unidimensional narrative of progress lies an overall darker and socially stratified reality, which we term the contactless state. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with citizens and experts in Spain and Italy conducted between 2025 and 2026, this paper examines how digitalisation reshapes the everyday experience of interacting with public institutions. We are interested in exploring an often-overlooked aspect of the relationship between citizens and the state, how citizens perceive the public administration and what are the needs and views they attribute to this relationship. We find that citizens approach the state with a mixture of anxiety and need for reassurance which is often overlooked by state services and which risks being exacerbated by the trend towards the digitalisation of public administration, with the way in which it leads to a further depersonalisation in the relationship between bureaucracy and the broader public Digitalisation thus produces a form of administrative precarity, characterised by anxiety, overburdening, and the absence of institutional reassurance.. This has important implications for processes of digital state transformation. Moreover, far from dematerialising bureaucracy, the digital state redistributes bureaucratic labour onto citizens themselves, producing forms of self-bureaucratisation through self-service models. These systems are often ill equipped to handle anomalies or errors, unlike traditional bureaucracies where rigid procedures were balanced by direct human mediation. The move from office-based, paper bureaucracies to virtual ones entails greater rigidity, outsourced labour, and rising demands for both digital and non-digital skills as citizens navigate complex systems alone. Rather than a linear path toward efficiency and legitimacy, digitalisation reveals a paradox: it may accelerate procedures while deepening feelings of isolation, anxiety, and frustration with the state. These dynamics are unevenly distributed along lines of class, education, and age. By foregrounding citizens’ lived experiences, the paper conceptualises digital government as a site of material and symbolic struggle reshaping citizenship in contemporary Europe.