When do bureaucrats choose to unburden clients: A randomized experiment

Abstract

Prior work refers to burdens in citizen-state interactions as administrative, even though most originate from the desk of politicians, not administrators. Even more, bureaucrats often act to unburden their clients via the discretionary powers they wield. This perspective has largely been overlooked in extant research. The present study asks under what conditions bureaucrats alleviate the burdens levied by elected officials on their clients. We propose that bureaucrats are more likely to use their discretion to unburden the most vulnerable groups. The study models vulnerability in terms of age and race, using two single-factorial randomized experiments on a sample of 580 U.S. public managers in a COVID-19 rental assistance setting. We find that client vulnerability drives bureaucrats' intent to unburden, but only in the context of age, not race. Also, the more administrators perceive themselves as public representatives, the higher their intention to unburden aid seekers. By contrast, bureaucrats with higher self-efficacy tend to unburden less.