The Distributional Consequences of Bureaucratic Discretion

• In Event: Experiments on Citizen-Elite Communication and Elite Responsiveness

Abstract

The actions of bureaucrats tasked with front-line service delivery influence “who gets what” public services. Two specific behaviors, absenteeism and bias, posit clear implications for variation in citizen access to public services. While audit experiments on bureaucrats provide new ways to measure bias and absenteeism, typical estimands used to measure of these phenomena provide relatively little information about the distributional impact of these behaviors. I draw upon a national-scale audit experiment of public services in Colombia to understand how these behaviors impact citizen access to two welfare services across the country. To do so, I apply new techniques to reweight experimental data. I first reweight the manipulated identity treatments to their prevalence within a given municipality. I then weight the resultant estimates to the municipality — the political unit — and population level. The results describe the consequences of bureaucrats' behavior for citizen access to public services and demonstrate the benefits and limitations of existing methods of analyzing data from audit experiments. This paper further develops a set of recommendations for measuring distributional politics more broadly.

Authors

• Tara L Slough, Columbia University

• Gabriella Sacramone-Lutz