Can the State Take the Burden? Implementation of Policies to Increase Elderly Enrollment in SNAP

• Author: Marian Negoita,Madeleine Levin,Anne Paprocki
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221115473
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221115473

Administration & Society

2023, Vol. 55(2) 211 –238

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997221115473

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Article

Can the State Take the

Burden? Implementation

of Policies to Increase

Elderly Enrollment

in SNAP

Marian Negoita1, Madeleine Levin1,

and Anne Paprocki1

Abstract

Extant literature has emphasized the role of significant inconveniences

for participants as a chief reason for under-enrollment in a variety of

social safety net programs. Consequently, a variety of policies have been

proposed to address this issue. This paper asserts that the capacity

of states, especially of frontline workers, to implement these policies

should not be taken for granted. Our analysis of two policies aimed at

increasing elderly participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance

Program suggests that policies that increased burdens for frontline

workers were implemented less faithfully and more unevenly, possibly

leading to more administrative burden on program participants. The

article proposes several methods to decrease implementation burden on

frontline workers.

Keywords

public benefits take-up, policy implementation, street-level bureaucracy,

administrative burden, food stamps

1Social Policy Research Associates, Oakland, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Marian Negoita, Social Policy Research Associates, 1333 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612, USA.

Email: marian.negoita@gmail.com

1115473AAS0010.1177/00953997221115473Administration & SocietyNegoita et al.

research-article2022

212Administration & Society 55(2)

Introduction

Several research traditions have emphasized how specific aspects of public

policies or programs inhibit citizens from applying to public programs. In

economics, the literature on the take-up of means-tested benefit programs has

emphasized transaction costs (i.e., factors that create significant inconve-

niences for participants or prospective participants) as a chief reason for

under-enrollment in a variety of social welfare programs (Currie, 2004).

Similarly, the emerging literature on administrative burden (Christensen

et al., 2020; Heinrich, 2016; Moynihan et al., 2015) has shown how specific

administrative requirements act as disincentives to enroll in programs.

Although a large amount of evidence shows that transaction costs and

administrative burdens exist and have real consequences, much of this litera-

ture has focused on eligible participants and the choices they make. More

specifically, the calls for reform typically made are to utilize public policies

to diminish transaction costs or “shift the administrative burden to the state”

(Herd et al., 2013)—for example, by simplifying enrollment procedures,

increasing recertification periods, and automating reenrollment. This paper

argues that the role of frontline workers in implementing these changes

should not be taken for granted. We marshal insights from the policy imple-

mentation literature which show that, even during the best of times, frontline

workers can have significant effects on how public policies are implemented.

More importantly, we show that several decades of New Public Management

(NPM) reforms have severely strained public administration systems, espe-

cially frontline workers. Therefore, shifting administrative burdens to the

state is much more problematic than might be anticipated. Our thesis is that

if a policy aimed at shifting the burdens from clients ends up over-burdening

frontline workers, causing the policy to deviate from its original design, it

will not be as successful in shifting administrative burden as intended.

The empirical terrain in which these conceptual discussions are grounded

is several U.S. states’ implementation of policies aimed at increasing partici-

pation of older adults in the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program

(SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program). The life of this paper

followed a rather circuitous path. Originally, the research that provides the

empirical basis for this paper was conducted for a large-scale evaluation

commissioned by the Food and Nutrition Service (a branch of U.S. Department

of Agriculture). The data collection effort for this evaluation was extensive,

including interviews and focus groups with older adults, interviews with fed-

eral, state, and regional program staff, interviews with frontline workers, and

administrative data collection of state SNAP records. During the writing of

the final report for the evaluation, the authors were struck by the (somewhat