Essays on Administrative Burden and E-Government in Social Services
Open Access DepositedPublic agencies are increasingly turning to digital systems to determine individuals’ eligibility for social programs, update personal data, manage cases, monitor claimants’ compliance with program rules, and distribute benefits. Digitalization influences both how public servants conduct their daily work and how citizens interact with the state. Administrative burden offers a promising theoretical framework for investigating how digital systems shape the distribution of benefits and burdens in such interactions. This dissertation, structured as three interconnected papers, uses multiple methods to explore themes related to public sector digitalization, the experience of administrative burden, and support for burdens in policy design. In Chapter 1, I use a systematic literature review to explore how digitalization influences the discretion of street-level bureaucrats. The results show that information and communication technologies affect human discretion through several mechanisms, including removing face-to-face interactions, standardizing processes, enhancing top-down monitoring, increasing information exchanges, and providing decision support. Street-level bureaucrats adopt various strategies to resist digital-driven standardization, suggesting that technology implementation may alter workplace dynamics and frontline workers’ professional identities. Revealing the processes of changing discretion has implications for research and practice as more agencies expand their reliance on ICT to deliver public services, thereby incorporating new actors and institutional arrangements. Chapter 2 examines the potential trade-offs between the administrative burdens imposed on clients and those experienced by frontline staff. Burden tolerance, understood as support for the learning, compliance, and psychological costs clients incur when seeking services, reflects a belief that such costs serve legitimate policy purposes. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with staff from U.S. workforce programs, I explore how administrative procedures and digital platforms shape public servants’ burden tolerance. The results show that public managers and frontline workers in a workforce and training program tend to have low tolerance for burden and frequently engage in active burden shifting to improve client experiences and their own workload. Chapter 3 uses a factorial survey experiment to investigate the factors driving burden tolerance when online application processes are used to determine eligibility for social benefits. While the concept of burden tolerance has recently attracted attention within the administrative burden research program, no empirical studies have explicitly considered the role of claimants’ digital skills in shaping public support for burdensome policy implementation. The survey results show that perceptions of claimants’ digital disadvantage significantly influence the recognition that an administrative procedure is onerous for specific populations. However, the effects on other components of burden tolerance are more mixed. The findings have implications for future research on passive and active support for burdens, as well as how e-government informs the distribution of benefits and burdens.
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Northcott_gwu_0075A_17691.pdf | 2026-02-26 | Open Access |
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