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Automation curtails the discretion of street-level bureaucrats in several ways: bureaucrats have little control over the input of data by claimants, management has increased opportunities for monitoring, and given the possibility that clients will deal with multiple bureaucrats, coworkers can now identify ''rogue'' agents. Some clients of a bureaucracy may benefit from the introduction of automation when the agency is biased against them. We test this claim by examining the recent introduction of the telephone claims in state Unemployment Insurance offices. Using state-level panel data from 1992 to 2005, we estimate the effect of filing a claim via telephone rather than in person. If street-level bureaucrats in this agency used their discretion to disentitle and punish clients who they deem ''undeserving'' of the policy benefits, then the introduction of automation could increase unemployment insurance (UI) payments for clients. Indeed, we find that telephone claims filing increases the number of women receiving UI benefits while having no effect on men. We posit that this finding is due to the elimination of the bias women previously faced when they entered a UI office.''People think they can take care of their grandchildren or paint the house,'' Mr. Brophy says. ''They can't, because they're not available for work if they're babysitting.'' Thomas Brophy, a claims examiner in the Trenton office of New Jersey's Division of Employment and Training (quoted in Rothfinder 1981).The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the reliance on technology for delivery of services by public organizations. These changes were fueled by a concern with streamlining the public sector in the hope of increasing efficiency. The use of technology has changed the structure and functioning of numerous large agencies in the United States, including how unemployment insurance (UI) claims are filed throughout the country. In addition, automation has affected the role of the bureaucrats working in theseWe thank Julie Dolan and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

The effect of identity, as socially constructed by race and gender, on social policies has been widely examined in policy analysis. Policy analysis would be improved by a wider discussion that includes the influence of social-psychological constructs on social provision. We fill this gap by drawing on the theory of the "belief in a just world" and link this theory to attitudes toward the support of controversial government programs. We argue that this theory is a critical antecedent to the previous research on social construction. We hypothesize that citizens who perceive that the world is just and that opportunities are equal between groups are much less likely to favor government interventions altering market outcomes. We find that after controlling for race, sex, and political ideology, respondents who believe that luck is the primary determinant of success (low belief in a just world) are more supportive of preferential hiring programs for African Americans and women.The development of social policy is, at its foundations, an expression of beliefs about who and why people deserve help. Citizens and policymakers have long debated who is deserving and undeserving, with these debates occasionally spilling over into violent acts or repressive policies. Skocpol argues that debates over who is deserving "run like fault lines through the entire history of American social provision" (1995, p. 149). However, most scholars treat desert as peripheral to the design and development of social policy. In this paper, we fill this gap by clarifying the role of deservingness 1 and illustrating the importance of desert in policymaking. We develop a theoretical model that explains how notions of deservingness are reflected in people's beliefs about justice. In turn, these shape attitudes toward programs designed to benefit groups, which ultimately are reflected in the design, implementation, and administration of U.S. policies.