Who Gets Help First? Bureaucratic Burden Tolerance and Active Representation in Client Selection

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

Abstract

This study bridges representative bureaucracy and administrative burden scholarships at the micro-level behaviors. Studies on representative bureaucracy emphasize the importance of transitioning from passive to active representation without tradeoffs. Research on active representation often explores the connection between passive representation and equitable outcomes or benefits for the client groups at the organizational level. What has not yet been extensively examined is a micro-level experiment to directly examine the bureaucratic discretion regarding client prioritization.  

We particularly focused on the burden tolerance of bureaucrats toward clients who are experiencing administrative burdens in the application process. Based on previous studies on the perception of discretion (Sowa & Selden, 2003), vulnerable social statuses of clients (Johnson and Neshkova, 2023), we posit hypotheses that bureaucrats will be more likely to support clients when clients have shared democratic characteristics (hypothesis 1), especially when bureaucrats perceive they have discretionary power (hypothesis 2). Moreover, considering the deservingness of clients (Jilke & Tummers, 2018), we expect that bureaucrats prioritize the clients when clients have a greater extent of need deservingness (hypothesis 3).  

We conducted a representative online survey from June to September 2023, using the Prolific survey platform. The conjoint survey experiment is widely utilized to explore symbolic representation, but not many studies have utilized the conjoint method to explore active representation on the bureaucrat side (except Kang & Jilke, 2022). We found that the demographic match between the bureaucrat (survey respondents) and the client (in conjoint selection option) increased the likelihood of prioritization of client selection, only when the bureaucrats have discretion, and clients showed a need deservingness.  

This study suggests two significant contributions. First, this study bridges the burden tolerance of bureaucrats and active representation. Second, this study utilizes a conjoint survey experiment to examine how demographic match, perceived discretion, and deservingness shape the micro-level behaviors of bureaucrats toward citizens.

Author

• Jaeyeong Nam, Kyung Hee University
  Presenting Author