Discrimination of Minority Welfare Claimants in the Real World: The Effect of Implicit Prejudice

Abstract

Exploiting rare access to doctors’ real-world judgments of incapacity benefits applications to an Israeli governmental program (2015-2017), we examine the prevalence and underlying mechanisms of discrimination against Muslims versus Jews. To mitigate confounding explanations for unequal treatment, we restrict the analysis to claimants whose applications passed a strict medical-disability threshold so that their medical condition was undisputed. Theoretically, we offer a comprehensive theoretical framework for possible micro-mechanisms underlying bureaucratic discrimination of minorities, the decision-environment conditions that instigate them, and observational implications for their decoding. Findings confirm that Jewish doctors were more likely to reject applications by Muslims and to recommend partial (but not full) compensation for Jews. Further, we empirically illustrate how our proposed theoretical framework can be employed to analyze which micro-mechanism is most likely to underlie discrimination and to empirically decipher among alternative explanations, demonstrating that bureaucratic discrimination, in this case, is best explained by implicit prejudice triggered under conditions of complexity and ambiguity that undermined doctors’ systematic processing of information.

The Intersectionality of Deservingness for State Support

“…Moreover, judgments at the threshold, and around it, are the most ambiguous, and thus logically likely to elicit doctors' reliance on extraneous heuristics, such as group identity, gender, work history, and their interaction (cf. Assouline, Gilad and Ben‐Nun Bloom 2022; Dovido and Gaertner, 2000).…”

“…The findings of these studies are mostly null (Dehon et al 2017; FitzGerald and Hurst, 2017; Hall et al, 2015; Maina et al 2018), likely suggesting that experiments with professionals are distinctly prone to social‐desirability bias and to the difficulty of replicating complex decision environments (cf. Assouline, Gilad and Ben‐Num Bloom 2022). Moreover, a key theoretical proposition of this paper is that whereas race and ethnicity are stable, perceived social distance is negotiable and malleable to social interaction.…”

“…The above experimental research mostly draws on variants of discrimination theory in economics and psychology (Andersen and Guul 2019; Assouline, Gilad and Ben‐Num Bloom 2022). These frameworks provide useful tools to decipher bureaucrats' average responses to citizens' race and ethnicity, and their underlying shaping by overt animosity or implicit prejudice, for example.…”

Overburdened Bureaucrats: Providing Equal Access to Public Services during COVID-19

“…Keiser et al (2004) show based on register data that non-whites are sanctioned more than white welfare recipients in the United States. Assouline et al (2021) use register data to document that Israeli Jewish doctors are more likely to reject applications for medical disability benefits by Muslims and to recommend partial compensation for Jews. Olsen et al (2020) use name cues in an audit study to document that Danish school principals are more willing to welcome students with Danish names at their school than students with Muslim names.…”

“…Audit studies look at actual discrimina-tory behavior, but most measure bureaucrats' inclination to provide information and the tone of the response (see Olsen et al 2020 for an exception). Providing information about a service constitutes a relatively low-cost commitment on the part of the bureaucrat, and it is a cognitively undemanding task that does not capture the ambiguity of discretionary bureaucratic judgments, such as granting or withholding welfare benefits (Assouline et al 2021).…”