Poster #116 - Top-down, bottom-up, or both? Configurational paths to administrative burden reduction

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Administrative burden is defined as the learning, psychological, and compliance costs that citizens and businesses experience in their interactions with government. Administrative burden reduction (ABR) has received considerable attention worldwide and can be achieved through either a top-down intervention or a bottom-up participation. Top-down-oriented studies emphasize the impact of government reforms and regulations on ABR, while few studies scrutinize the role of bottom-up participation and accountability exerted by citizens and businesses on ABR. Notably, no single approach can lead to successful outcomes. Moreover, some countries achieve successful ABR while others fail. This raises an important question: what and how configurational paths of top-down and bottom-up approaches can lead to successful versus unsuccessful ABR?

This study aims to examine the combinatorial effects of top-down and bottom-up approaches on ABR using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method. Our study comprises administrative burden reduction as the outcome of interest, three top-down conditions (digital government, government effectiveness, and control of corruption), and three bottom-up conditions (digital participation, new business density, and voice and accountability). With data collected from multiple sources, including the Doing Business Report, UN E-Government Survey, World Governance Indicators, and Entrepreneurship Database, we constructed a dataset of 136 countries. We adopted a direct calibration method to transform the raw data into fuzzy membership scores.

The necessity analyses show that none of the six conditions (neither in their presence nor in their absence) are necessary conditions for successful or unsuccessful ABR. Nevertheless, a group of two SUIN conditions (digital government or digital participation) is necessary for successful ABR, while another group of two SUIN conditions (absence of digital government or absence of digital participation) is necessary for unsuccessful ABR. The standard analyses identify three distinctive paths leading to successful ABR and three other different paths causing unsuccessful ABR. The configuration results show that the combination of top-down and bottom-up conditions, especially the conjunction of digital government and digital participation, can lead to successful ABR. On the contrary, the absence of three top-down conditions (digital government, government effectiveness, and control of corruption), along with the absence of two bottom-up conditions (digital participation and new business density), leads to unsuccessful ABR. We also conducted a generalized analytical induction, and the results were highly consistent with the configurations identified above.

As one of the pioneering papers to conduct cross-country ABR research, this study contributes methodologically and empirically to the literature on administrative burden. As for its methodological contribution, this study adopts the configurational method, which incorporates necessity analysis, sufficiency analysis, and analytical induction, to identify combinations of determinants of ABR and unpack the complex relationships among multiple factors. This study also has important practical implications. On the one hand, it identifies different paths comprising of top-down and bottom-up conditions to explain different ABR outcomes. On the other hand, it highlights the imperative of technological factors (digital government and digital participation) in conjunction with organizational and institutional factors in shaping the effectiveness of administrative burden reduction.

Authors

• Yao Liu, Xi'an Jiaotong University
  Presenting Author

• Bin Chen, Baruch College (City University of New York)
  Non-Presenting Co-Author