174 Public Administration Review • March/April 2002, Vol. 62, No. 2 Mark Bovens Utrecht University Stavros Zouridis Tilburg University From Street-Level to System-Level Bureaucracies: How Information and Communication Technology Is Transforming Administrative Discretion and Constitutional Control 1 The use of information and communication technology (ICT) is rapidly changing the structure of a number of large, executive public agencies. They used to be machine bureaucracies in which street-level officials exercised ample administrative discretion in dealing with individual clients. In some realms, the street-level bureaucrats have vanished. Instead of street-level bureaucracies, they have become system-level bureaucracies. System analysts and software designers are the key actors in these executive agencies. This article explores the implications of this transformation from the perspective of the constitutional state. Thanks to ICT, the implementation of the law has virtually been perfected. However, some new issues rise: What about the discretionary power of the sys- tem-level bureaucrats? How can we guarantee due process and fairness in difficult cases? The article ends with several institutional innovations that may help to embed these system-level bu- reaucracies in the constitutional state. The Issue: Discretionary Power of Civil Servants in the Constitutional State Bureaucracy is no longer what it once was. The term conjures up mental visions of massive buildings in which large groups of men—bureaucrats are, without exception, men—encumbered by stacks of files frown heavily into duplicates and triplicates of important reports embellished with impressive-looking signatures. Bureaucrats are well known to be small-minded pencil pushers who can reject or approve an application for no better reason than the fact that your existence has somehow annoyed them. This was the specter that haunted Weber, Hayek, and Popper: Large numbers of faceless officials whose freies Ermessen (discretionary power) could cause an open soci- ety to be smothered in the bud. Decades of legal and ad- ministrative ingenuity have been devoted to curtailing the influence of these tiny cogs in the wheel of power. An elabo- rate system of legal protection and the sweeping applica- tion of the principles of sound administration over the past decades have more or less successfully led to the erection of a cordon sanitair around the majority of large-scale ex- ecutive organizations. Hayek’s prophecy of doom—in which he held that the rise of the welfare state, with its social benefits and subsidies, licenses and decisions, win- Mark Bovens is a professor of public administration at the Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His recent books include The Quest For Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship In Complex Organizations (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Success and Failure in Public Governance (with P. ‘t Hart and B. Guy Peters. Edward Elgar, 2001). Email: m.bovens@usg.uu.nl. Stavros Zouridis is an associate professor of public administration at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on the functioning of poli- tics, the bureaucratic phenomenon, and the implications of the Internet for public administration. Recently he published Digital Disciplining (The Impact of Information Technology on the Implementation Process) and Inside Politics (with Pieter Tops), both in Dutch. Email: s.zouridis@kub.nl.