Frontline employees' responses to citizens' communication of administrative burdens

• Published date: 01 November 2024
• Author: Aske Halling,Niels Bjørn Grund Petersen
• Date: 01 November 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13800

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Frontline employees’responses to citizens’communication of

administrative burdens

Aske Halling

1

| Niels Bjørn Grund Petersen

2

1

Department of Political Science, Aarhus

University, Aarhus C, Denmark

2

VIVE –The Danish Center for Social Science

Research, Åbyhøj, Denmark

Correspondence

Aske Halling, Department of Political Science,

Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 7, 8000

Aarhus C, Denmark.

Email: aske@ps.au.dk

Abstract

The literature on administrative burdens demonstrates that citizens may experi-

ence different kinds of administrative burdens when interacting with the state.

However, we know little about whether citizens’communication of these experi-

ences affects how frontline employees implement compliance demands. Building

on the street-level bureaucracy and administrative burden literature, we hypothe-

size that citizens’communication of direct and indirect psychological costs affects

frontline employees’inclination to accommodate citizens. Furthermore, we expect

this effect to be stronger for members of the ethnic majority than for ethnic

minority members. We test these expectations using a preregistered survey experi-

ment on a sample of 1048 Danish public caseworkers from 32 employment agen-

cies. Results show that frontline employees are indeed more willing to reduce

demands and help citizens that communicate their experiences of direct and indi-

rect psychological costs. Further, we find some evidence that frontline employees

are more responsive to citizens from the ethnic majority.

Evidence for Practice

•The study shows that citizens’experiences of burdens cannot simply be derived

from formal policy design. To understand how citizens’experiences of burdens

are shaped, we need to take the informal implementation of policies into

account as well.

•Our results demonstrate that frontline employees in unemployment agencies

are more willing to prioritize and reduce state demands for citizens who com-

municate direct and indirect psychological costs. Further, we find some evidence

of discrimination against ethnic minorities.

•Our results suggest that public organizations may be able to reduce citizens’

experiences of burdens by providing citizens with a line of communication to

the frontline employees.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the literature on administrative burdens

has demonstrated how state demands can have severe

consequences for citizens’psychological well-being

(Baekgaard et al., 2021; Christensen et al., 2020; Jilke

et al., 2018) and inflict substantial economic costs on soci-

ety (Sunstein, 2019). While this research has provided

ample evidence that state demands cause citizens to

experience psychological costs, we know little about

whether citizens communicating these psychological

costs (Gilad & Assouline, 2022) in citizen–state interaction

can feed back into the implementation of state demands.

Understanding the construction of administrative bur-

dens in frontline implementation of polices is crucial

because frontline employees often have the discretion

and authority to either reduce or enhance the compliance

demands causing the psychological costs (Jilke

et al., 2018; Lipsky, 1980; Soss et al., 2011a). Consequently,

to comprehend citizen–state interactions, we not only

Received: 4 June 2022 Revised: 6 February 2024 Accepted: 12 February 2024

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13800

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

© 2024 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

Public Admin Rev. 2024;84:1017–1037. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar 1017

need to understand how state demands affect citizens

(Baekgaard et al., 2021; Moynihan et al., 2015) but also

how and when citizens’communication of burdens affect

frontline employees’enforcement of state demands in

public organizations (Masood & Nisar, 2021). Therefore,

this study examines how citizens’communication of

direct and indirect psychological costs affects frontline

employees’intended decision-making and whether their

decisions are conditional on citizens’characteristics in

term of their ethnicity.

Our starting point isprevious research showing that cit-

izens often communicate their onerous experiences in

citizen–state interactions (Bell et al., 2023;Bisgaard,2023;

Gilad & Assouline, 2022; Nielsen et al., 2021). Such experi-

ences may be communicated through numerous different

encounters with frontline personnel; for example, when

parents share their frustrations and experiences with case-

workers in child protection services (Karmsteen, 2023),

unemployed clients discuss their job situation with case-

workers (Pedersen et al., 2018;Schrametal.,2009)or

entrepreneurs negotiate with frontline labor inspectors or

tax officials (Raaphorst & Loyens, 2020).

Building on the street-level bureaucracy literature, we

argue that frontline employees in these citizen–state

interactions are primarily guided by a citizen–agent narra-

tive (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000) that makes them

move toward citizens when burdens are communicated

(Tummers et al., 2015). Consequently, we theorize that

the communication of burdensome experiences –in our

setting direct and indirect psychological costs –makes

frontline employees more inclined to engage in efforts to

help citizens and reduce their burdens. Psychological

costs refer to psychological discomfort that arises as a

direct consequence of a concrete state demand

(e.g., anxiety from having to fill out an unemployment

benefit claim), while indirect psychological costs refer to

psychological discomfort that is not directly tied to a spe-

cific state demand but arises while a person is complying

with state demands (e.g., developing anxiety while partic-

ipating in a compulsory public program).

Further, we know from previous research that front-

line employees do not always treat citizens equally

(Andersen & Guul, 2019; Pedersen et al., 2018) and that

marginalized groups are often disproportionately tar-

geted with administrative burdens (Christensen

et al., 2020; Nisar, 2018; Olsen et al., 2020). In particular,

scholars have shown that frontline employees tend to dis-

criminate based on race or ethnicity by treating citizens

from the ethnic majority more favorably compared with

citizens from the ethnic minority (Pedersen et al., 2018;

Schram et al., 2009). To understand the conditionality of

burden communication, we also investigate whether

frontline employees are more likely to reduce demands

and help citizens from the ethnic majority compared with

minority members (Olsen et al., 2020).

To test our preregistered hypotheses,

1

we conduct a

large-scale factorial 2 2 vignette survey experiment on

a sample of 1048 professional caseworkers who work in

Danish unemployment agencies. We focus on citizens’

communication of direct and indirect psychological costs

because previous work has already demonstrated that cit-

izens experience these types of cost in the context of our

study (Baekgaard et al., 2021). In our experiment, we

manipulate (1) whether citizens communicate psychologi-

cal costs and (2) citizen ethnicity (Middle-Eastern

vs. Danish). Using a within-subject experimental design,

we provide the caseworkers with three fictitious vignettes

describing different citizen–state encounters familiar to

the caseworkers. In one vignette, we manipulate psycho-

logical costs caused directly by state demands, and in the

other two vignettes, we manipulate indirect psychological

costs that arise while participating in mandatory job train-

ing programs. Following each vignette, caseworkers eval-

uate their inclination to make an extra effort to help the

citizen and reduce the citizen’s compliance demands.

Thus, we do not measure the frontline employees’actual

behavior, but instead their behavioral intentions. Our

results show that frontline employees are more inclined

to reduce state demands and help citizens when citizens

communicate their experienced psychological costs. This

is true for both indirect and direct psychological costs,

though effect sizes are larger for indirect costs. In addi-

tion, we find some evidence that frontline employees are

more responsive to burden communication from mem-

bers of the ethnic majority.

Our study makes at least three important contribu-

tions to the literatures on administrative burdens and

street-level bureaucracy. First, while some scholars in this

field have begun exploring the role of frontline

employees in shaping experiences of burden (Bell

et al., 2020; Bell & Smith, 2022), knowledge about how cit-

izens’communication of burdens affects administrative

decision-making remains scarce. As mentioned, citizens

frequently voice their burdens in encounters with the

state (Bell et al., 2022; Karmsteen, 2023; Nielsen

et al., 2021), and it is therefore critical that we understand

how this communication affects decisions, especially as

some citizens may be conscious about how it can sway

decision-making at the frontline (Döring, 2021; Döring &

Madsen, 2022; Raaphorst & Loyens, 2020). Our study

shows that citizens’burden communication directly influ-

ences frontline employees’prioritization intentions and

inclination to reduce burdens for citizens, that is, lead to

more favorable decisions. While it is certainly positive that

frontline employees respond to citizens’needs, our find-

ings raise concerns about differential treatment of citi-

zens, as resourceful citizens may be more likely to

communicate burdens (Gilad & Assouline, 2022), and the

least resourceful citizens may be unable to do so effec-

tively (Christensen et al., 2020).

Second, our study contributes to the growing street-

level bureaucracy literature on the factors that shape

frontline employees’decision-making. Previous studies

have shown that demographic characteristics such as

1018 CITIZENS’COMMUNICATION OF ADMINISTRATIVE BURDENS