Administrative Burden: Do Measures Approximate the Concept?

• In Event: Governance Transitions, Network Dynamics, and Organizational Adaptation

Abstract

Measurement is one of the most challenging tasks in the social sciences. Operationalizing measures that appropriately capture key concepts is critical to quantifying abstract social phenomena, advancing knowledge, and prescribing actions or solutions. Accurate, systematic measurement is particularly important in policy sciences, where researchers seek to address practical problems using measures to identify problems and assign prescriptive solutions. To resolve problems related to administrative burdens, we need reliable, valid measures of those burdens. In the public sector, administrative burdens, generally defined as onerous experiences of policy implementation (Burden et al. 2012), are the result of how governments design and carry out programs. These burdens can negatively affect public service delivery and create real costs for citizens. There is a plethora of empirical work advancing theoretical and practical knowledge on administrative burdens. This research has sought to operationalize learning, compliance, and psychological costs and assess relationships between administrative burdens and behavioral, attitudinal, and distributional outcomes, including program take-up, trust in government, well-being, and inequality (Herd & Moynihan, 2019; Barnes, 2021). Researchers have used surveys, experiments and various qualitative methods to understand how citizens and public sector employees experience administrative burdens. However, less research has focused on whether these measures properly capture the underlying concepts. There is a great deal of measurement variation in the administrative burden literature, which raises concerns about measurement validity and reliability. It remains unclear whether these measures consistently capture the same construct. Additionally, differences in wording, interpretation, and operationalization may undermine reliability. These issues limit the reproducibility and comparability of findings and hinder the accumulation of knowledge. We ask: to what extent are existing measures reliable and valid, and what are the most appropriate measures of administrative burden and its associated concepts? We conduct a set of survey-based measurement experiments to test the reliability and validity of current administrative burden measures. We leverage variation in question wording and framing to assess whether different measures produce consistent interpretations and responses to appropriately capture key concepts. We find that variation in definitions and measurement leads to substantively different response patterns, suggesting that administrative burden measures are highly sensitive to operationalization and that variation in previous findings may stem from measurement differences rather than solely from underlying latent factors. We then identify the most appropriate measures of administrative burden that reliably approximate the underlying concepts, advancing a more consistent, robust approach to measurement. By refining and validating a set of measures for administrative burden and its related concepts, the results offer tools that will enable more comparable, reliable research across contexts.



References

Barnes, C. Y. (2021). “It takes a while to get used to”: The costs of redeeming public benefits. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 31(2), 295-310.

Burden, B. C., Canon, D. T., Mayer, K. R., & Moynihan, D. P. (2012). The effect of administrative burden on bureaucratic perception of policies: Evidence from election administration. Public Administration Review, 72(5), 741-751.

Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2019). Administrative burden: Policymaking by other means. Russell Sage Foundation.

Authors

• Tiantian Yu, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Mary Feeney, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Susan Marie Miller, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author