A qualitative study of Russian-speaking migrants in Finland (Safarov, 2023) proposed that independent use of digitalised public services requires a pyramid of five resources, with language skills and digital skills forming the base and bureaucratic literacy, structural knowledge of public organisations, and welfare-system navigation layered above, and found that multi-channel (digital plus in-person) delivery did not meet migrants' service needs, while third-sector and social-network assistance only partly compensated for missing literacies and often left needs unmet. The study was explicit that its workshop-recruited, predominantly female, single-regime sample does not generalise. The open problem is to establish the boundary conditions of this administrative-literacy account: test whether the pyramid structure holds across other migrant groups, genders, and welfare-state regimes, and determine whether multi-channel delivery, third-sector or social-network assistance, or technology-mediated support can substitute for migrant-specific, language-accessible digital support without leaving entitlements unclaimed or perpetuating dependency. No study known to date tests the pyramid in a distinct welfare-state regime or migrant population, evaluates substitution, studies men's access and help-seeking, or examines the dependency conditions of network-based bypass; the question remains open.

Background

As welfare states move service delivery online, scholars speak of a 'digital welfare state': the use of digital systems (web forms, identification portals, automated processing) as the primary channel through which citizens claim social benefits and entitlements. Research on this transformation shows that it shifts work from civil servants to citizens themselves: instead of a clerk guiding a claimant through a process, the claimant must find the relevant service, authenticate electronically, understand bureaucratic vocabulary, and complete procedures unaided. The concept of administrative literacy (AL) captures the resources this self-service model demands. Grönlund, Hatakka and Ask (2007) defined AL as the ability to navigate bureaucracy, including knowing how society's institutions work, the terminology involved, where to find forms, procedures and contact information, and being able to understand and act upon the information once found. Döring (2021) refined the concept into a set of component competencies (functional, communicative, structural-processual, civic, and media literacy) needed to use digital public services, distinguishing AL from digital skills, the operational and information-handling abilities needed to use computers and the internet. A complementary framing, administrative burdens, denotes the experience of policy implementation as onerous, including the learning costs of finding out about services (Herd and Moynihan's work, adopted widely in this literature). Migrants are a critical case: they face the same digitalisation as everyone else while also having to learn the local language, the structure of unfamiliar institutions, and how an unfamiliar welfare system operates. Safarov (2023) studied this in Finland, a leader in government digitalisation whose social benefits are delivered largely through the Social Insurance Institution (Kela) and used online with bank-based electronic identification. Through roughly 100 hours of participant observation in digital-skills workshops and 20 interviews (only 3 with men) with Russian-speaking migrants in the Helsinki capital region in 2020, most of them dependent on social benefits, the study analysed what resources claimants need in order to use digital public services independently. Its central findings were: (1) missing any one of five resources leaves a person unable to navigate the services independently; (2) these resources are ordered as a pyramid, an ideal-type hierarchy in which language skills and digital skills form the foundational base, and bureaucratic literacy (understanding bureaucratic vocabulary and communicating with authorities), structural knowledge of public organisations (which institutions exist, what they are responsible for, what entitlements are available), and welfare-system navigation (how and where to find information and apply) are successive layers built on that base; (3) these literacies do not transfer from the country of origin, so migrants start acquiring them from zero; (4) formal multi-channel delivery, the combination of digital and in-person service channels that earlier e-government research expected to solve access problems, did not meet migrants' needs in claiming social protection; (5) social networks and third-sector organisations (NGOs, associations) could partly bypass the literacy requirements, but when such support was insufficient participants still had to acquire the whole pyramid to avoid losing entitlements, and after receiving help their service needs often remained unmet. The study concluded with explicit calls for further research: into the effectiveness and limitations of third-sector organisations and other assistance models with complex digital service needs, into how men access and seek help with digital public services (the sample was predominantly female), and it acknowledged that findings from workshop-recruited Russian-speakers in one Finnish region do not necessarily apply to other migrant groups, genders, or locations, or, by extension, to other welfare-state regimes.

Problem Statement

Establish the boundary conditions of the administrative-literacy account of migrants' access to digitalised public services, in two coordinated strands that together answer where the account applies and what can relieve its burden. First (generality of the pyramid): determine whether the pyramid structure proposed by Safarov (2023), with language skills and digital skills forming the base and bureaucratic literacy, structural knowledge of public organisations, and welfare-system navigation layered above, describes the resource requirements of migrant claimants in welfare-state regimes, migrant groups, and genders other than the original study's Russian-speaking, predominantly female, workshop-recruited sample in the Helsinki capital region, including in particular how men access and seek help with digital public services; this includes establishing whether the component set, their non-transferability across countries, and their claimed ordering hold, are refined, or fail. Second (substitution and compensation): determine whether multi-channel delivery of digital and in-person services, third-sector assistance, social-network support, or technology-mediated assistance can substitute for the personal acquisition of the pyramid's literacies, specifically under what conditions such substitution results in actually obtained entitlements and met service needs for complex digital service situations rather than unmet needs, and under what conditions social-network or third-sector bypass of literacy requirements avoids perpetuating dependency on intermediaries. The second strand asks which delivery or assistance designs secure independent, language-accessible access to social protection for migrant claimants, and how far any such substitution extends across populations and regimes. Conclusions are confined to the populations, regimes, and substitution modes examined.

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