Suchergebnisse

What does a government do when it decides to make a public service as burdensome as possible? We consider this question in the context of immigration policy during the Trump administration. The case demonstrates the deliberate and governmentwide use of administrative burdens to make legal processes of immigration confusing, demanding, and stressful. Many of these changes occurred via what we characterize as formal administrative directives, a level of policy implementation that falls between high-level formal executive legal powers, such as executive orders or rules, and street-level discretion, pointing to the importance of processes such as memos and training as an understudied space of using burdens to make policy. The case challenges the standard portrayal of the principal–agent dilemma, given that the political principals engaged in a disruption of public services akin to sabotage, while the bureaucratic agents remained largely quiescent. The outcome was a system of racialized burdens, where changes were targeted at racially marginalized immigrants. The case also highlights the use of fear as a particular type of psychological cost.

This article offers two theoretical contributions. First, we develop the concept of administrative burden as an important variable in understanding how citizens experience the state. Administrative burden is conceptualized as a function of learning, psychological, and compliance costs that citizens experience in their interactions with government. Second, we argue that administrative burden is a venue of politics, that is, the level of administrative burden placed on an individual, as well as the distribution of burden between the state and the individual, will often be a function of deliberate political choice rather than simply a product of historical accident or neglect. The opaque nature of administrative burdens may facilitate their use as forms of 'hidden politics,' where significant policy changes occur without broad political consideration. We illustrate this argument via an analysis of the evolution of Medicaid policies in the state of Wisconsin. Across three Governorships, the level of burden evolved in ways consistent with the differing political philosophies of each Governor, with federal actors playing a secondary but important role in shaping burden in this intergovernmental program. We conclude by sketching a research agenda centered on administrative burden. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractPoliticians engage in, and the media amplifies, social constructions of welfare recipients as undeserving. Such messaging seeks to influence mass public opinion, but what are the effects on the target population receiving welfare benefits? We test if deservingness messaging affects welfare recipients' mental health. To do so, we exploit a quasi-experiment entailing a dramatic shift in deservingness messaging after a welfare recipient in Denmark became the subject of a national debate, utilizing detailed administrative data on the ensuing consumption of antidepressants by other welfare recipients. We find evidence that welfare recipients experienced worse mental health outcomes after being exposed to deservingness messaging, reflected in a 1.2-percentage-point increase in the use of antidepressants in the weeks following the airing of a critical interview. Deservingness messaging particularly affected more vulnerable groups who had a history of mental health problems.

While politicians wage legislative battles about welfare benefits, bureaucratic procedures represent a less visible means to shape access to those benefits. By constructing complex and time-consuming application procedures, the state can effectively create administrative barriers that limit access to benefits. What explains the variation in the level of administrative burden that individuals face? We address this question by examining Medicaid procedures across the 50 U.S. states, identifying different types of administrative barriers. We find that such barriers tend to be lower in states with unified Democratic control of political institutions.

Abstract
We revisit Arunachalam and Watson's contention that a person's physical height may be used as instrument for income because it affects economic well-being solely by causing more conservative political preferences among people who are taller. To evaluate whether other early-life and genetic factors might serve as mechanisms connecting height and political preferences, we analyze a unique data source that includes political, economic, and demographic data on same-gender siblings. Models that include fixed effects for siblings provide a strong test of the Arunachalam and Watson thesis. We find that height is not a consistent predictor of political preferences once shared sibling characteristics are controlled in this way, raising doubt about whether height can in fact be used as an instrument for income.

AbstractPublic services represent a key means by which societies seek to reduce inequalities. However, some people may experience administrative procedures as more burdensome than others, creating inequality within programs intended to be equity‐enhancing. Prior work has found human capital (e.g., education and conditions like scarcity) to affect burden and take‐up. We build on this by examining the role of health in the form of attention disorders, pain, anxiety, and depression in the context of tax reporting in Denmark and college financial aid in Oklahoma, USA. Across cases, attention disorders and pain are associated with more burdensome experiences and in the financial aid case, they are associated with reduced take‐up as well. Individuals suffering from multiple health problems have the most negative experiences and lowest take‐up. The results suggest that extra support may be needed for people suffering from health problems in order to reduce inequities in experiences and outcomes.

Abstract
A perennial task for the state is the creation and policing of categories. State-created categories have real world impacts on the public. The consequences of racial categorizations, for example, are well-documented. We examine a less studied consequence of state categorization, which are the administrative burdens created when individuals attempt to match themselves to state-created categories. Matching requires time and effort, and failure to match to an advantageous category can mean a loss of material benefits. The matching problem may sometimes result from obscure categories, or an overwhelming number of categories. The matching problem is also amplified when the state uses identity categories—such as self-employed or unemployed, a retiree, parent, spouse or disabled—where individuals hold pre-existing beliefs about such identities that map poorly onto equivalent state categorizations. To study the matching problem and ways to reduce it, we undertook a field experiment in a California welfare program, CalFresh, the state version of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Claimants often fail to select into the category of "self-employed" even though it would be more favorable for them to do so. We show how a more intuitive presentation of information about the category and its benefits increased the rate of those identifying as self-employed from 8.8% to 12.1%, approximately one-third. We also show that providing a simple self-attestation template to convey information about self-employment status, a means of reducing compliance costs while meeting state documentation requirements, increased the number of claimants providing an acceptable form of documentation to match to the category. The results show that people frequently lack an intuitive understanding of state categories, that the presentation of categories can reduce this matching problem, and that the state can make it easier to document the match.