Poster #139 - Burden in Disruption: Administrative Burden, Street-level Bureaucracy, and Crisis

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Literature on administrative burden has examined the onerous experiences citizens encounter when accessing services, theorizing three types of burden, learning cost, compliance cost, and psychological cost (Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey 2015; Herd and Moynihan 2018; Halling and Baekgaard 2024). While existing research treats these costs as potentially co-occurring, there is a need to examine how one type of burden can generate others, or how the relationships between burden types shift when governance systems are destabilized. A related gap is on the role of street-level bureaucrats on administrative burden. Recent work demonstrates that administrator stress is associated with increased burden among clients (Mikkelsen, Madsen, and Baekgaard 2023; Zuber, Strach, and Pérez-Chiqués 2024), the behavioral mechanisms linking worker coping choices to client burden experience remain underdeveloped, particularly under unstable environment.           

This paper addresses these gaps by examining administrative burden during the 2025 U.S. government shutdown. Government shutdowns are environmental shocks to the agencies that produce a sudden period of disrupted service delivery. In this paper, we argue that the shutdown context illuminates three theoretical arguments. First, administrative burden is not constant across time but varies dynamically in response to environmental disruption, with external environment shocks can increase all three cost types simultaneously and disproportionately. Second, one type of burden can lead to another. Under increased stress and uncertainty, compliance costs can lead to additional psychological costs. Third, street-level bureaucrats may adopt coping strategies in response to their own lack of resources and support, which may function as burden-transfer mechanisms to clients (Tummers et al. 2015; Edri-Peer and Cohen 2025).           

We will draw on semi-structured interviews with federal workers who directly engaged with citizens during the shutdown and with citizens who interacted with government services during that period. Bureaucrat interviews will focus on the environmental pressures they experienced, the coping strategies they adopted, and their perceptions of how those strategies affected citizens. Interviews with citizens will focus on the burdens they encountered, their emotional and behavioral responses, and the quality of their interactions with federal workers. This paper contributes to the administrative burden and street-level bureaucracy literature by examining the temporal burden and how it affects the citizen-state interactions.

Author

• Xiaoyang Xu, University of South Carolina
  Presenting Author