Representative Bureaucracy and Administrative Burdens: Exploring the Intersection of Lived Experience, Gender, and Expertise

• In Event: Reducing the Psychological Burden of Administrative Processes

Abstract

Building resilient and transformative public services requires an understanding of bureaucrat-client relationships and the preferences of clients therein. The representative bureaucracy theory literature has explored such relationships through analyses of race, ethnicity, and gender, with little attention paid to other identities (Bishu & Kennedy, 2020; Kennedy, 2014). Representation through lived experience has recently shifted representative bureaucracy theory from a focus on demographic characteristics to an emphasis on the lived experiences of both the bureaucrat and the client (Lofaro & Sapat, 2024a, 2024b; Merritt et al., 2020; Park, 2020). This form of representation can result in increased levels of trust within the bureaucrat-client relationship, client-centered perspectives in the administration of care, and a higher quality of public services overall. 

Administrative burdens, on the other hand, represent the various barriers people face when attempting to access government services, programs, or benefits (Herd & Moynihan, 2019). Some research on administrative burdens has drawn attention to the disparities present in burdensome experiences and focused on providing solutions to reduce burdens and enhance equity (Baekgaard et al., 2021; Bell & Smith, 2021; Sievert et al., 2020). However, little is known about how administrative burdens and representation intersect to affect bureaucrat-client relationships, especially regarding mechanisms of burden reduction and the influence of intersectionality. 

In this article, we connect representative bureaucracy and administrative burden literature, hypothesizing that representation through lived experience may reduce psychological costs in citizen-state interactions. We seek to understand the conditions under which lived experience representation, gender representation, expertise, responsiveness, and competence matter, defining conditions by the type of administrative burden present. Via a conjoint survey experiment, we provide military veterans with various hypothetical scenarios symbolizing psychological, compliance, and learning costs, asking them to choose which of two United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employees would best assist with healthcare benefits in these different situations. The VA employee profiles vary based on veteran status, gender, disability status, years working with veterans, responsiveness, and average ratings from past clients. Veterans will also be asked about the trustworthiness of each VA employee and how likely they would be to offer services efficiently. Subsample analyses include examining the effects of respondents’ veteran identity centrality, disability status, and gender, as well as exploring various intersectionalities.

Contributions to the field include exploring symbolic representation, intersectionality, and administrative burdens, as well as distinguishing between the types of costs to better understand burden scenarios in which identities, expertise, and competence matter. By examining trustworthiness and efficiency, we also identify mechanisms through which representation and burden reduction operate. The implications of such analyses extend beyond the VA. Understanding how representation, competence, and expertise affect experiences with psychological, compliance, and learning costs can help agencies determine how to implement policies to address complex societal challenges and build trust in public services.

Authors

• Ryan Lofaro, Georgia Southern University
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Bell, The University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Colt Jensen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Co-Author