One means by which the state reinforces inequality is by imposing administrative burdens that loom larger for citizens with lower levels of human capital. Integrating insights from various disciplines, this article focuses on one aspect of human capital: cognitive resources. The authors outline a model that explains how burdens and cognitive resources, especially executive functioning, interrelate. The article then presents illustrative examples, highlighting three common life factors-scarcity, health problems, and age-related cognitive decline. These factors create a human capital catch-22, increasing people's likelihood of needing state assistance while simultaneously undermining the cognitive resources required to negotiate the burdens they encounter while seeking such assistance. The result is to reduce access to state benefits and increase inequality. The article concludes by calling for scholars of behavioral public administration and public administration more generally to incorporate more attention to human capital into their research. Evidence for Practice• People's human capital influences how they engage with administrative processes. Groups with lower levels of human capital struggle more with administrative burdens; therefore, they are less likely to access public services. • A citizen-centered approach to public administration implies that policy makers and administrators take account of variation in human capital when making choices about policy design and implementation. • Cognitive resources, including executive functioning, are a form of human capital, which is key to citizens' ability to initiate and master state interactions. • Citizens experiencing scarcity, health problems, and cognitive decline face a catch-22: such common life factors make them more likely to need to engage with the state, but reduce their executive functioning, making them less able to deal with administrative burdens.

Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs? And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information? Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly. These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens. The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information. However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided.

In times of severe international crises, such as wars and terrorist attacks, citizens tend to ‘rally around the flag’ and increase their support for political leaders. We ask if the rallying effects identified in the literature extend to the societal lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19-related lockdowns differ from crises studied in the existing literature because they are political crisis responses with severe and immediate negative effects on the economy. Using daily responses right before and after the announcement of the Danish lockdown on March 11, 2020, we study trust in democratic institutions among unemployed Danes over the first three weeks of a large-scale societal lockdown. OLS estimates show that trust in the Danish Prime Minister’s administration was higher immediately after the lockdown announcement. This increase lasted throughout the entire period of measurement (until the end of March). We find similarly increased trust in other institutions, most significantly the judicial system and the public sector at large, whereas findings for trust in parliament and the media are less clear. Interrupted time series estimates point to the same conclusions albeit they produce estimates with more noise. Overall, our findings are consistent with the idea that citizens tend to ‘rally around the flag’ in times of crisis and furthermore suggest that increased trust tends to spill over to institutions that are not involved in crisis management decisions.

Performance data allows politicians to exert accountability over public organizations, even as ideological biases can affect how they interpret such data. However, we know little about how motivated decision-makers prioritize goals when facing multiple pieces of contradictory performance data that reflect the competing goals of public services. Such goal conflict is an inherent aspect of public management. To understand its implications for the use of performance data use we develop a theory of goal reprioritization. We start by assuming that elected officials have preferences between specific policy goals, and about governance processessuch as a preference for public or private service provision. When elected officials face contradictory pieces of performance data, governance preferences drive performance evaluations to the point that they are willing to reweight their goal preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance. We offer experimental evidence of this process, showing that elected officials asked to evaluate school performance reprioritize between two distinct policy goals for schoolstest scores and student well-beingto fit with their governance preferences. Reprioritization is an attractive strategy since it allows elected officials to claim they are using performance data, even as underlying governance preferences lead them to set aside the evaluative goal-based criteria by which they would otherwise make performance evaluations. In other words, preferences concerning the nature of government can trump goal preferences when decision-makers use performance data.

A growing body of evidence shows that politicians use motivated reasoning to fit evidence with prior beliefs. In this, they are not unlike other people. We use survey experiments to reaffirm prior work showing that politicians, like the public they represent, engage in motivated reasoning. However, we also show that politicians are more resistant to debiasing interventions than others. When required to justify their evaluations, politicians rely more on prior political attitudes and less on policy information, increasing the probability of erroneous decisions. The results raise the troubling implication that the specialized role of elected officials makes them more immune to the correction of biases, and in this way less representative of the voters they serve when they process policy information.

No abstract

State actions impact the lives of citizens in general and government benefit recipients in particular. However, little is known about whether experiences of psychological costs among benefit recipients can be relieved by reducing compliance demands in interactions with the state. Across three studies, we provide evidence that reducing demands causes relief. In a survey experiment, we show that psychological costs experienced by Danish unemployment insurance recipients change in response to information about actual reduced compliance demands. In two field studies, we exploit survey data collected around a sudden, exogenous shock (the COVID-19 lockdown of Danish society in March 2020), which led to immediate reductions in compliance demands in Denmark’s active labor market policies. We test whether two groups of benefit recipients experienced reduced psychological costs in response to these sudden reductions in compliance demands imposed by the state. Across all studies, we find that the reduction of compliance demands is associated with an increased sense of autonomy, and in two of the three studies it is associated with reduced stress. Overall, our findings suggest that psychological costs experienced by benefit recipients are indeed affected by state actions in the form of compliance demands.

No abstract