The Intersectionality of Deservingness for State Support
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Author | Michaela Assouline,Sharon Gilad |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13466 |
Research Article:
Race and Gender
Symposium
487
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Sharon Gilad is a Professor at the Political
Science Department and the Federmann
School of Public Policy at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Her research foci
include bureaucratic agencies’ identity,
reputation, and responsiveness to public
demands, civil servants’ social identities
and intergovernmental social networks,
representative bureaucracy, discrimination
of minorities, and citizen–state interactions.
Email: sharon.gilad@mail.huji.ac.il
Abstract: Studies of the ramifications of client race and ethnicity for bureaucrats’ judgments treat minority status as
homogenous. Yet, individual identity does not boil down to race or ethnicity. Members of racial and ethnic minority
groups likely vary in their experiences and capacity to overcome the negative sentiments and stereotypes that burden
their inherited group. To transcend unidimensional explanations, we combine Van Oorschot’s deservingness framework
and a gendered lens to study how the intersection of group identity and gender, as well as individuals’ work history,
co-shape bureaucrats’ categorization of clients. Empirically, we analyze Israeli professionals’ categorization of applicants
for state benefits, comparing their assessments of men and women of three social groups: the Jewish majority, ultra-
orthodox Jews, and Muslims. Interpreting the empirical findings, we offer that underlying the effect of applicants’
group demographics are perceived cultural affinity to the majority and social contributions that vary with gender.
Evidence for Practice
• Minority status, based on race, ethnicity, or nationality, and the perceived contributions of different groups,
shape bureaucrats’ judgments of individuals’ deservingness for state support.
• Minorities’ workforce opportunities and interactions with members of the majority likely vary with gender
roles.
• If traditional gender roles among some minority communities provide men with greater opportunities for
workforce participation and for interaction with members of the majority, bureaucrats may perceive women
as less deserving than men. Depending on the task at hand, this could hamper women’s likelihood of
attaining benefits for which they are entitled.
Street-level bureaucrats’ judgments of clients
and their cases are guided by a combination of
rules and cues for moral deservingness (Guul,
Pedersen and Petersen2020; Jilke and Tummers2018;
Maynard-Moody and Musheno2003, 2012;
Schram et al.2009; Soss, Fording and Schram2011;
Thomann and Rapp2018). As race and ethnicity are
patent candidates for the cues that bias bureaucratic
judgments, a proliferating research body, most
of which is experimental, examines bureaucrats’
responses to vignettes and “correspondence audits,”
that is, field experiments that measure administrators’
response to fictitious email information requests
given random assignment to majority versus
minority sounding aliases (Adman and Jansson2017;
Andersen and Guul2019; Einstein and Glick2017;
Giulietti, Tonin, and Vlassopoulos2019; Grohs,
Adam, and Knill2016; Hemker and Rink2017;
Jilke, Van Dooren and Rys2018; Oberfield
and Incantalupo2021; Pedersen, Stritch and
Thuesen2018; Schram et al.2009; White, Nathan
and Faller2015). In these studies, factors other than
race and ethnicity, such as gender or social class, are
treated as possible confounders that need to be ruled
out (e.g., Andersen and Guul2019; Giulietti, Tonin,
and Vlassopoulos2019), thus, paying little explicit
attention to bureaucrats’ differentiation among
individuals based on their compound identities as
minorities and women, for example. Yet, in actuality,
as public administration scholars acknowledge
(Bearfield2009; Breslin, Pandey and Riccucci2017;
Fay et al.2020; Portillo2010), the intersection of
race, ethnicity, and gender entails different experiences
and outcomes for men and women (Cole2009;
Hancock2007; McCall2005). This paper theorizes
and empirically examines bureaucrats’ responses to
such intersectionality as reflected in their real-world
judgments.
The above experimental research mostly draws on
variants of discrimination theory in economics and
psychology (Andersen and Guul2019; Assouline,
Gilad and Ben-Num Bloom2022). These frameworks
provide useful tools to decipher bureaucrats’ average
responses to citizens’ race and ethnicity, and their
underlying shaping by overt animosity or implicit
Michaela Assouline
Sharon Gilad
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Michaela Assouline is a researcher and
a public servant in the Israeli government.
She received her PhD from the Hebrew
University’s Political Science Department
in 2021. Her research focuses on social
deservingness and the equity of social
services.
Email: mikaella.assouline@gmail.com
Public Administration Review,
Vol. 82, Iss. 3, pp. 487–502. © 2022 The
Authors. Public Administration Review
published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on
behalf of American Society for Public
Administration.
DOI: 10.1111/puar.13466.
The Intersectionality of Deservingness for State Support
488 Public Administration Review • May | June 2022
prejudice, for example. While valuable, these frameworks are
insufficient for elucidation of uneven bureaucratic responses within
racial and ethnic groups. To develop an account for bureaucratic
responses given citizens’ composite identities we build on van
Oorschot’s(2000, 2006) framework, which points to manifold
criteria that coalesce in shaping judgments of others’ deservingness
for state support. To this framework, we add a gendered lens,
scrutinizing the possibility that bureaucrats’ responses to clients’
identity and deservingness cues vary with gender roles. Thus, this
paper examines to what extent are bureaucrats’ reactions to citizens’
group identities moderated by clients’ gender and deservingness
cues?
Empirically, we benefit from a rare access to restrictive
administrative records of Israeli Jewish doctors’ categorization of
applicants for state incapacity benefits as fulfilling the threshold
criteria for a legally qualifying disability. This access reflects the
studied organization’s strong committment to transparency and
equality. Our large and detailed dataset (N=13,269) enables us to
compare doctors’ decisions involving men and women of the Jewish
majority, Muslims, and ultra-orthodox (“Haredi”) Jews, exploiting
a divergence in the gender roles across the three groups. Further, we
analyze the interaction between citizens’ group-gender identity and
their prior work history to examine whether doctors apply a “double
standard” in response to personalized deservingness cues.
In what follows, we introduce our theoretical framework, and
then apply a gender-deservingness lens to the Israeli context, and
delineate concrete hypotheses to guide the empirical analysis.
Thereafter, we explain the data structure and the operationalization
of variables, present empirical findings, including robust analyses
and a supplementary experiment with regular citizens, and draw
conclusions and implications for future research.
Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Deservingness
To theorize bureaucrats’ responses to the intersection of clients’
gender, race, and ethnicity, or, in the Israeli case, gender, nationality,
and religiosity (Frenkel and Wasserman2020), we turn to van
Oorschot’s(2000, 2006) established framework, which has been
shown to consistently account for citizens’ compound perceptions of
others’ deservingness for state welfare support. Moreover, previous
studies confirm the relevance of this framework for bureaucratic
attitudes and judgments (Jilke and Tummers2018; Thomann and
Rapp2018).
Employing surveys, focus groups, and experimental vignettes, van
Oorschot and others demonstrate that citizens consistently rank
immigrants and, to a lesser extent, native social minorities as the
least deserving for welfare benefits and support; whereas the elderly
are seen as the most deserving group, followed by the disabled,
parents to children and the unemployed (Buss2019; Heuer and
Zimmermann2020; Laenen, Rossetti and van Oorschot2019; van
Oorschot2000, 2006). van Oorschot’s(2000, 2006) framework
points to a number of criteria to explain the above rankings, and
citizens’ disinclination to provide support for minorities and
immigrants in particular. The first and most straightforward
criterion is “identity,” reflecting perceived social distance, such that
“needy people who are closer to ‘us’ are seen as more deserving”
(Van Oorschot2006, 26). This notion of “identity” or social
distance coheres with the more general theory and evidence for
in-group and out-group biases, whereby people tend to hold positive
attitudes and empathy toward those whom they perceive as like
them and thus favor them in allocation of resources (Tajfel1982).
Confirming van Oorschot’s supposition that perceptions of social
distance may underlie the effect of race, ethnicity, and nationality
on deservingness are experimental studies in the United Kingdom
and the Netherlands that find respondents more benevolent toward
native-born minorities compared with immigrants (Ford2016;
Kootstra2016). Other studies indicate that citizens’ perceptions
of immigrants are shaped by the time passed since immigration
(Reeskens and van der Meer2019), by immigrants’ local language
proficiency (Hainmueller and Hopkins2015) and by their displayed
willingness to assimilate to the local culture (Nielsen, Frederiksen
and Larsen2020). Thomann and Rapp(2018) extend these insights
to examine Swiss bureaucrats’ processing of incapacity benefits.
Analyzing a carefully selected sample of 90, all-male, applicants,
they find that immigrants from the former Yugoslavia endure a
prolonged process yet are eventually as likely as Swiss to be granted
benefits, whereas Turkish immigrants are less likely to be awarded
benefits. The authors demonstrate that underlying these different
group outcomes is not immigrants’ country of origin per se, but
years having lived in Switzerland, that is, social distance—such
that longer residency results in more favorable treatment. Further
elucidating the mechanism underlying these findings, studies show
that when members of the national majority perceive immigrants,
as a group or as individuals, as having adopted the host country’s
culture, this is taken as a signal of immigrants’ identification with
the host state, resulting in their perception as less threatening to
the in-group and in more positive attitudes toward them (López-
Rodríguez et al.2014; Roblain, Azzi and Licata2016). Conversely,
immigrants’ seeming rejection of the majority’s culture is associated
with their perception as a “realistic threat” to the in-group’s material
well-being and as a “symbolic threat” to its cultural identity (cf.
Stephan et al.2005).
The social distance and the negative stereotypes that are associated
with distinct ethnic and racial groups have been shown to further
moderate, or to be moderated by, the effect of cues regarding two
additional deservingness criteria—”control” and “reciprocity” (van
Oorschot2000, 2006). Control relates to perceptions of others’
motivation and culpability for their predicament; reciprocity
regards valuation of others’ previous contributions to society. With
some inconsistency, studies reveal a double standard, whereby
citizens’ valuations of others’ deservingness for state support tend to
disproportionality credit members of the majority for positive cues
regarding their lack of control and previous social contributions,
such as actively seeking work and/or a longer work history,
and to penalize minorities and immigrants for cues indicating
their blameworthiness and poor work history (DeSante2013;
Kootstra2016; Reeskens and van der Meer2019). Relating to
bureaucrats, a double standard is echoed in the findings of Schram
et al.(2009) and Pedersen, Stritch and Thuesen(2018) regarding
American and Danish bureaucrats’ inclination to cut welfare
recipients off benefits for allegedly breaching their duty to actively
seek work. Employing vignettes and selected administrative data,
the authors find that welfare bureaucrats disproportionately sanction
African American and Hispanic clients in the United States, and
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