The Bite of Administrative Burden: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

Abstract

The study of administrative burden-experienced in individual encounters with government-is being renewed with new theoretical developments and policy applications. Building on recent developments, this article aims to broaden the conceptual framing of administrative burden and extend its empirical investigation beyond concerns about access to and efficiency of public services to questions of individual and societal impacts. It also expands beyond the typical US or developed country context to examine this phenomenon in the setting of a large social protection program in South Africa, where the "bite" of administrative burden may potentially be bigger. The empirical analysis uses data from the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) evaluation to investigate how CSG program rules and requirements affected administrative burdens and erected barriers to grant receipt. The findings show that 60% of CSG recipients experienced an interruption or disconnection in grant receipt that appears to be associated with administrative burden, with 80% of those stoppages in error. The resulting loss of monthly benefits has significant negative implications for the outcomes of adolescents targeted by the program. I thank the Economic Policy Research Institute for support of my early work with these data, which motivated this research, and Robert Brill, formerly a graduate student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, for his contributions toward cleaning and programming the data for analysis. I also thank the referees for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this article, as well as

Low‐trust bureaucracy: Understanding the Mexican bureaucratic experience

“…Latin American bureaucracies are notorious for their inefficiency and opacity, yet there is very little empirical research done on what exactly constitutes the "bureau- Most of what we know about administrative burdens comes from studies conducted in the United States and Western Europe (Moynihan & Herd, 2010). The few studies on the administrative burdens citizens in developing countries face suggest that the bite of these burdens is even higher there (Heinrich, 2016;cf. Dasandi & Esteve, 2017).…”

“…However, we argue that burdens can also be explained by more systemic elements in public administration, such as policy paradigms, organisational design, organisational capacity, information technology, historical legacies, and traditions (Cesarini & Hite, ; Painter & Peters, ; de Jong, ; Heinrich, , p. 406). In this article, we propose to look at the structural characteristics of the Mexican administrative context, which creates important behavioural incentives and disincentives that affect administrative burdens.…”

“…Most of what we know about administrative burdens comes from studies conducted in the United States and Western Europe (Moynihan & Herd, ). The few studies on the administrative burdens citizens in developing countries face suggest that the bite of these burdens is even higher there (Heinrich, ; cf. Dasandi & Esteve, ).…”

Presidential Address: “A Thousand Petty Fortresses”: Administrative Burden in U.S. Immigration Policies and Its Consequences

“…A lack of resources for implementing and enforcing the many provisions under these laws is just one of a number of factors that may make the actual implementation and enforcement of immigration policies highly dependent on the discretion of a variety of actors or stakeholders involved (Motomura, ). Figure , adapted from Heinrich () and Kahn, Katz, and Gutek (), illustrates four quadrants or categories of administrative burden with encounters or interactions stemming from some of the most common provisions of recent legislative and policy actions directed toward immigrants, including examples (in italics) specific to the case study presented here.…”

What Explains Short Spells on Child-Care Subsidies?

“…Literature in public management on the troublesome administrative aspects of public programs, or what Heinrich (2016) refers to as the bite of administrative burden, can inform subsidy instability research. Research documents the frustration induced by bureaucratic encounters and efforts to navigate the application process of welfare programs such as TANF and other means-tested programs (Soss 1999(Soss , 2000Moynihan, Herd, and Rigby 2016).…”