Citizens as Owners? How Psychological Ownership of Public Goods Shapes Burden-Bearing Citizens’ Evaluations of Administrative Requirements

• In Event: Information, Communication, and Citizen-Government Encounters

Abstract

Administrative burden scholarship has significantly advanced understanding of how bureaucratic encounters shape the meaning of citizenship. It has paid less attention, however, to how citizens’ perceived ownership over public goods shapes their responses to the administrative requirements they encounter when accessing those goods. From a social-contract perspective, citizens are principals with a legitimate collective claim to public goods, but delegation places those goods under governmental custody and beyond citizens’ direct control. This arrangement creates a gap between formal entitlement and citizens’ felt sense that a service is genuinely theirs. Although foundational research across public administration, political science, and economics shows that perceived ownership shapes how individuals value, use, and engage with shared resources, ownership remains underdeveloped in administrative burden research as a motivational condition for explaining how citizens interpret and evaluate procedural requirements.Integrating psychological ownership theory with the administrative burden framework, this study examines whether citizens’ perceived psychological ownership over a public good moderates how they interpret and evaluate administrative requirements imposed as a condition of service access. The empirical context is a digital emergency-alert service in which users must agree to a privacy policy governing the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information before receiving the service. Unlike eligibility checks in means-tested programs where administrative requirements are designed to screen deservingness or ration benefits, the burden arises when access to a broadly shared public service becomes contingent on compliance with a privacy-related safeguard that serves a plausibly legitimate protective purpose. This setting provides a unique environment for examining burden evaluations among the general public who encounters administrative burden, where beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries are not clearly separable.Using a 2×2 survey experiment, the findings show that citizens who feel stronger psychological ownership over the service evaluate the procedural requirement significantly more favorably than those who do not. These results suggest that ownership perceptions can reduce the perceived psychological costs of necessary administrative procedures by making them appear more connected to protecting a shared public good.The study contributes to administrative burden scholarship by extending the framework to public-goods settings and by identifying psychological ownership as a citizenship-based condition shaping burden evaluations. Practically, the findings suggest that governments should not only reduce unnecessary burdens but also explain why necessary procedures exist. When agencies clearly communicate how procedural safeguards protect services in which citizens have a shared stake, they may improve public evaluations of digital service delivery.

Authors

• Jeongmin Oh, Hanyang University
  Presenting Author

• Donwe Choi, Hanyang University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Fran Berry
  Non-Presenting Co-Author