Bureaucratic Barriers to Accessing Social Services and Digital Transformation

This article aims to classify the bureaucratic barriers that restrict access to social services within a theoretical framework and to establish under which conditions digital transformation reduces these barriers and under which it reproduces them. The study is a qualitative conceptual analysis. It brings together Weber's theory of bureaucracy, Merton's critique of bureaucratic dysfunction, Lipsky's theory of street-level bureaucracy, the administrative burden and non-take-up approaches, and the literature on digital-era governance, and it examines the cases of Estonia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia and Türkiye. Bureaucratic barriers are grouped into six types: information, procedure and documentation, institutional fragmentation, space and time, discretion and attitude, and psychological cost. The findings show that digital transformation largely removes barriers of a technical nature but creates new ones in the form of digital exclusion, the shifting of administrative burden back onto citizens, and algorithmic rigidity. What determines the outcome is not the technology itself but whether the administrative burden is transferred to the state or to the citizen. The article proposes multi-channel service delivery, human oversight, transparency, effective means of appeal and proactive identification of entitlement as the conditions for a digital transformation that widens access.