Special issue introduction: administrative burdens as a global public management phenomenon

KEYWORDS:

• Administrative burden
• burden tolerance
• citizen state interaction
• public value
• human capital

Administrative burdens have been conceptualised as people’s experience of policy implementation as onerous, taking the form of learning, compliance and psychological costs that people experience in their interactions with the state (Heinrich, 2018; Herd & Moynihan, 2018; Masood & Nisar, 2021; Peeters, 2020). Such burdens can have a large effect on whether people can access benefits or rights to which they are entitled, and shape public beliefs about their relationship with government. They can also make it harder for public officials to do their jobs.

This special issue takes up the topic from a variety of perspectives and settings. Bhuiyan and Baniamin examine burdens in Bangladesh’s birth registration system. Their research reiterates that burdens that restrict access to identity are some of the most critical in accessing citizenship rights (e.g., Heinrich, 2018; Nisar, 2018). They point out that burdens are not just a function of state action, but also relate to citizen capacities. This joins broader work on the topic that draws attention to human capital in shaping how individuals manage burdens, such as cognitive functioning (Christensen et al., 2020), health (Bell et al., 2023) as well as administrative capital (Masood & Nisar, 2021).

Bhuiyan and Baniamin also show how digitalisation, a project that should reduce burdens, can sometimes snare people in “digital cages” (Peeters & Widlak, 2018), a risk that is especially likely in settings where citizens have limited digital literacy. Moreover, errors, often on the part of state actors, cascade for individuals, their consequences becoming almost impossible to escape, especially in brittle digital spaces. Third parties, through informal but compensated fixers, play a role in resolving these and other hassles. The compensation of those fixers represents an invisible but real tax on citizens. The vulnerability of citizens not just to poor administration, but expensive and sometimes unreliable third parties, increases their psychological costs.

If Bhuiyan and Baniamin offer a classic study of the experience of burden, Campbell and Ahn tackle another part of the administrative burden agenda, by examining factors associated with burden tolerance. Burden tolerance examines variation in people’s willingness to accept state actions that will impose hassles on others (Baekgaard et al., 2021). Understanding the sources of burden tolerance help us to understand the sources of burdens.

The authors examine burden tolerance among a group of South Korean citizens, using an experimental design. The most compelling finding is that burden tolerance is associated with bureaucratic personality. Prior research (Aarøe et al., 2021) pointed to the relationship between personality and burden tolerance among policymakers, using Big Five personality measures. Openness to experience is associated with lower burden tolerance, and conscientiousness is associated with higher burden tolerance. Campbell and Ahn find that bureaucratic personality, which reflects an appreciation for rules, is associated with higher burden tolerance. One implication is that as public organisations attract, or cultivate, bureaucratic personality among employees, this fosters an acceptance of burdens. Consistent with this point, government employees in their study were more tolerant of burdens than others.

Muhammad Azfar Nisar and Ayesha Masood take up the question of the legitimacy of burdens. They have undertaken pioneering research on the topic in Pakistan (Nisar, 2018; Masood and Nisar 2021). One of the contributions of the administrative burden framework is to acknowledge that some costs imposed on individuals may be justified, but still be costly. Indeed, most hassles that people encounter will have some justification. This encourages the adoption of a cost-benefit approach to burdens, pushing policymakers not just to acknowledge tradeoffs between the purposes and drawbacks of burdens, but to empirically quantify those tradeoffs (Herd & Moynihan, 2018). Nisar and Masood add to this discussion by drawing on public value accounting as an analytical framework to identify categories of those costs and benefits. In doing so, the work builds a bridge between public value and administrative burden frameworks.

Better measurement of burdens is the next challenge for administrative burden research. Strikingly, it is as much a challenge for policymakers as it is for scholars, illustrating the applied relevance of the framework, and the opportunity of scholars to put their research to real-world use. For example, the Biden administration in the United States has pushed agencies to better measure different types of costs that make up administrative burdens (Young, 2022). In practice, measurement strategies will have to deal with practical issues of ease of data collection and communication. In other words, the hassles of measurement will become one aspect of burden reduction. Scholars can help by developing practical measurement tools.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donald Moynihan

Donald Moynihan is the inaugural McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. He examines the behavioural effects of efforts to improve public sector outcomes through government reform, as well as the administrative burdens people encounter in their interactions with government. At the McCourt School, he co-directs the Better Government Lab. His research has won awards from the Academy of Management, the American Political Science Association, and the American Society for Public Administration.

Pamela Herd

Pamela Herd is professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on inequality and how it intersects with health, ageing, and policy. She is also an expert in survey research and biodemographic methods. She is currently one of the Co-Principal Investigators for the General Social Survey, an Investigator with the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey, and Chair of the NIH Data Advisory Board for the National Study of Adolescent Health. She has received grant awards for her work from the National Institutes for Health, National Institutes on Ageing, the National Science Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and AARP.