Citizen Reactions to Bureaucratic Encounters: Different Ways of Coping With Public Authorities

Abstract

Common to most studies on street-level bureaucrats is a fundamental acknowledgement that behaviors of citizens with whom the street-level bureaucrats interact play an important role for their decision-making. However, within literature there is a lack of generic and systematic attention to the agency of the citizens. This paper aims to respond to this criticism and answer the questions: How do citizens cope with public encounters? Do citizen behaviors towards public authorities divide into distinct, meaningful, multidimensional behavior types? Through an explorative theory based approach the paper opens those questions. Based on self-reported survey-data on behavior, from a representative sample of Danish citizens we use latent class analysis (LCA) to identify systematic patterns in citizens’ behavior towards public authorities (exemplified by Tax and Home Care Referral authorities). We identify five types of citizen coping behavior in public encounters: “Resisters”, “Activists”, “Accommodators”, “Flighters”, and “Cooperators”. The five types of coping behaviors can be placed in a three dimensional space measuring degree of activity, degree of preparation, and degree of opposition. We suggest that this insight and conceptual framework of citizen coping behavior can create a starting point for researchers to embark a research agenda on citizens’ coping behavior in citizen-state encounters.

How-to Bureaucracy: A Concept of Citizens’ Administrative Literacy

“…Moreover, AL does not cover generic executive functions as discussed by Christensen et al (2020) as they are considered to be domain nonspecific to bureaucratic encounters. Thus, if we want to assess public encounters to their fullest extent, AL provides a frame to assess situations prior to, during, and after public encounters (Nielsen et al, 2020).…”

“…Masood and Nisar (2020) describe in their case study how knowledge about bureaucratic rules and procedures enables clients to approach public organizations more proficiently, resulting in higher success rates when applying for maternity leave. Nielsen et al (2020) provide a useful set of client types based on their behavior prior and during public encounters.…”

Mitigating Psychological Costs—The Role of Citizens’ Administrative Literacy and Social Capital

“…Why is this differentiation necessary? Researchers have stressed the importance of citizen's available resources when navigating and coping with burdensome administrative encounters (Döring 2021; Heinrich 2016; Masood and Nisar 2021; Nielsen, Nielsen, and Bisgaard 2021). For instance, Christensen et al (2020) emphasize that human capital (or the lack of it) affects how hard burdens hit recipients of public programs with distributive effects.…”

“…The skills and knowledge are clustered into several sub‐dimensions: functional, communicative, processual, structural, media, and civic literacy. These subsets cover all phases of citizen–state interactions (Döring 2021; Nielsen, Nielsen, and Bisgaard 2021)—from collecting and assessing information, exchanging information with street‐level bureaucrats to, eventually, deriving personal decisions based on Steps 1 and 2. Masood and Nisar's (2021) conceptualization of administrative capital builds on a similar logic; however, they focus on domain‐specific knowledge.…”

“…Recently, researchers have started to explicitly address whether individual resources influence how citizens perceive, engage, and cope with administrative processes (Christensen et al 2020; Döring 2021; Masood and Nisar 2021; Mik‐Meyer 2017; Masood and Nisar, Nielsen, and Bisgaard 2021). Here, it is widely claimed that citizens with lower levels of human and social capital are less able to navigate these processes and thus experience administrative burdens more severely (Herd and Moynihan 2019).…”