An Audit Study of Administrative Burdens in Primary School Access

• In Event: Representative Bureaucracy: New Directions and New Evidence

Abstract

Overview
In their role as gatekeepers of public services, street level bureaucrats can discriminate in ways that undermine equal access to public services. They can do so both directly through the allocation of public resources, and indirectly by imposing or reducing administrative burdens on citizens. This paper uses an audit study approach to offer evidence of both mechanisms.

Questions
Our research questions are: Do school officials engage in direct discrimination by offering school places to families with a Arab-Muslim name less frequently than their Danish peers? Do bureaucrats engage in indirect discrimination by imposing greater compliance burdens on Arab-Muslim families? We answer these questions using an audit study where putative Arab-Muslim and Danish families request to transfer their child to a local school.

Contribution
Our analysis builds on prior audit studies of public sector discrimination in a number of ways. First, we test if direct discrimination exists in the allocation of public resources. Prior public sector audit studies typically involve relatively low-cost commitments on the part of the public actor – a request for information, or a meeting – and are often measured only in terms of whether the individual receives a response or not. Such responses are assumed to influence, but do not directly measure, access to public services. In our study bureaucrats are asked to make a costly and real commitment – a place for a student in their school. We therefore examine actual decisions to allocate public resources, not just requests for information. To our knowledge, no field experiment study of public sector discrimination has taken this approach. Our second contribution is to reframe the ways in which indirect discrimination can occur. To do so, we apply the administrative burden framework, which identifies how citizens struggle to deal with learning, compliance, and psychological costs that arise in their interactions with the state.

Method
We sent a request to Danish school bureaucrats from an in-group (a typical Danish name) and out-group (Arab Muslim) asking if it was possible to move their child to the school. We study parents opportunity for requesting a school transfer for their kid in Denmark. Some 670,000 Danish students attend a public or private elementary school with a clear majority of 83 percent attending a public school. Every year some 40,000 students transfer school. The research design is a correspondence study where each unit receives one treatment (single treatment). The field experiment is a 2x2 factorial design where the variation lies in the experimental inquiries regarding ethnicity and information about the pupil’s educational standards respectively. In total, 1,698 free and private primary schools are contacted via a mailing system programmed for the purpose.

Findings
We find large differences in the access provided between the two groups, with Danes receiving a clear acceptance at higher rates than Arab Muslims. For those not receiving clear acceptances, we find some evidence of discrimination in the application of administrative burdens. Arab Muslim senders were more likely to face compliance costs in the form of additional questions, while native Danes were more likely to be invited to talk via phone to provide more information.

Authors

• Asmus Leth Olsen, University of Copenhagen

• Donald P. Moynihan, Georgetown University