Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro-level perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing on insights from psychology on the behavior of individuals and groups. The authors discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology and related fields and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. An analysis of public administration topics through a psychological lens can be useful to confirm, add nuance to, or extend classical public administration theories. As such, behavioral public administration complements traditional public administration. Furthermore, it could be a two-way street for psychologists who want to test the external validity of their theories in a political-administrative setting. Finally, four principles are proposed to narrow the gap between public administration and psychology.

Street-level bureaucrats have to cope with high workloads, role conflicts, and limited resources. An important way in which they cope with this is by prioritizing some clients, while disregarding others. When deciding on whom to prioritize, street-level bureaucrats often assess whether a client is deserving of help. However, to date the notion of the deserving client is in a black box as it is largely unclear which client attributes activate the prevailing social/professional category of deservingness. This article, therefore, proposes a theoretical model of three deservingness cues that street-level bureaucrats employ to determine whom to help: earned deservingness (i.e., the client is deserving because (s)he earned it: “the hardworking client”), needed deservingness (i.e., the client is deserving because (s)he needs help: “the needy client”), and resource deservingness (i.e., the client is deserving as (s)he is probably successful according to bureaucratic success criteria: “the successful client”). We test the effectiveness of these deservingness cues via an experimental conjoint design among a nationwide sample of US teachers. Our results suggest that needed deservingness is the most effective cue in determining which students to help, as teachers especially intend to prioritize students with low academic performance and members of minority groups. Earned deservingness was also an effective cue, but to a lesser extent. Resource deservingness, in contrast, did not affect teachers’ decisions whom to help. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings for discretionary biases in citizen-state interactions are discussed.

Public services are often provided in markets where both public and private providers operate. Irrespective of ownership status, public services ought to be accessible regardless of clients' race, gender, ethnicity, or age. However, as theories of statistical discrimination and cream skimming suggest, market-based incentives may lead service providers to focus on non-minority clients because they perceive them as easier-to-serve and therefore less costly. This may lead to discrimination and hence jeopardizes equal access. In this study, we ask whether private, for-profit providers are more likely to discriminate on ethnic grounds compared to publicly owned providers. We implement a field experiment within the Flemish elderly care market by sending out email requests with either a Flemish or a Maghrebian name to all public and privately owned nursing homes. For overall response rates, no statistically significant differences between senders were found. However, we do find that privately owned facilities are about 20 percentage points less likely to provide information on how to enroll when the request is send from a Maghrebian name alias, and blinded coders perceive the information sent to the Maghrebian alias as less comprehensive. In publicly owned facilities, no such differences exist. We conclude that a public-private difference does exist, but that the mechanism of discrimination is subtler than expected. Rather than directly refusing to respond, nursing homes increase administrative burdens and learning costs for minority applicants.