Everyday administrative burdens and inequality

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• Author: Lucie Martin,Liam Delaney,Orla Doyle
• Date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13709

SCHOLARLY TAKES

Everyday administrative burdens and inequality

Lucie Martin

1,2

| Liam Delaney

2,3

| Orla Doyle

1,2

1

School of Economics, University College Dublin,

Dublin 4, Ireland

2

Geary Institute for Public Policy, University

College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland

3

Department of Psychological and Behavioural

Science, London School of Economics and

Political Science, London, UK

Correspondence

Lucie Martin, School of Economics, University

College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.

Email: lucie.mrtn@gmail.com

Funding information

Irish Research Council

Abstract

Administrative burdens create costly experiences for citizens, especially disadvan-

taged groups. Research to date focuses on how burdens affect outcomes in spe-

cific policy contexts, thus little is known about cumulative experiences of burdens

in everyday life and their distribution in society. This is the first study to document

everyday administrative experiences, accounting for time and well-being costs

across 10 domains: tax, retirement, government benefits, bills, goods and services,

savings, debt, health, child care, and adult care. Survey results from 2243 UK adults

show that administrative tasks are a significant part of everyday life, with time and

well-being costs that vary by domain. Benefits-related tasks are particularly costly.

There is evidence of distributive effects. Those in poor health and financial insecu-

rity are more likely to engage in salient tasks, such as benefits, but less likely to

engage with longer-term tasks including savings and retirement. They experience

higher well-being costs, especially during salient tasks.

Evidence for practice

•Citizens experience significant amount of administrative burdens in daily life

from a broad range of domains, such as government benefits, bills, and health

among others.

•Tasks related to government benefits generate the highest well-being costs of

all administrative domains, ahead of debt and tax.

•Disadvantaged citizens experiencing health issues or financial insecurity are

more likely to report spending time on tasks related to government benefits,

health, and debt, and they face higher well-being costs, especially during tasks

relevant to their disadvantage.

•Strategies to tackle administrative burdens should consider citizens’overall

administrative workload and should consider focusing administrative assistance

on disadvantaged groups.

INTRODUCTION

Administrative tasks are ubiquitous in daily life. They

underlie processes from applying for welfare programs to

switching insurance providers, returning goods, or claim-

ing tax credits. These processes impose costs on citizens,

thereby shaping policy outcomes. These costs are studied

as administrative burdens (Herd & Moynihan, 2019) and

through the related concept of “sludge,”or frictions, in

the behavioral public policy literature (Sunstein, 2021).

Administrative burdens can significantly impact people’s

lives, for example by impeding access to education

(Dynarski et al., 2021), government benefits (Fox

et al., 2023), and healthcare (Fox et al., 2020). Further-

more, they may disproportionately prevent disadvan-

taged groups, such as older, sicker, or poorer citizens,

from accessing key services (Christensen et al., 2020).

Hence administrative burdens are a feature of everyday

life that may exacerbate inequality.

Current understanding of how people experience

administrative burdens is limited as most empirical evi-

dence comes from policy case studies that analyze the

Received: 21 March 2022 Revised: 17 July 2023 Accepted: 17 July 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13709

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

660 Public Admin Rev. 2024;84:660–673.

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