The ontology, origin, and impact of divisive public sector rules: A meta‐narrative review of the red tape and administrative burden literatures

• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Author: Jesse W. Campbell,Sanjay K. Pandey,Lars Arnesen
• Date: 01 March 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13527

RESEARCH ARTICLE

The ontology, origin, and impact of divisive public sector

rules: A meta-narrative review of the red tape and

administrative burden literatures

Jesse W. Campbell

1

| Sanjay K. Pandey

2

| Lars Arnesen

3

1

Department of Public Administration, Incheon

National University, Incheon, South Korea

2

Trachtenberg School, The George Washington

University, Washington, District of

Columbia, USA

3

Federal Reserve Board of Governors,

Washington, District of Columbia, USA

Correspondence

Jesse W. Campbell, Department of Public

Administration, Incheon National University,

Incheon, South Korea.

Email: jcampbell@inu.ac.kr

Abstract

A rule is divisive when its legitimacy is contested and divisive rules are an endur-

ing theme of public administration research. For over three decades, this research

has been shaped by red tape theory, which conceptualizes divisive rules as those

which consume an organization’s resources but fail to advance its goals. Recently,

however, the administrative burden framework, which prioritizes the impact of

divisive rules on citizens and links their origins to political motives, has grown in

popularity. We take stock of the last decade of research on red tape and adminis-

trative burden using the meta-narrative review methodology. We identify five nar-

ratives within the two research traditions and discuss their distinct research

questions, theoretical mechanisms, privileged actors, and rule assumptions, as well

as their strengths, limitations, and practical implications. These insights are lever-

aged to analyze the origins, impact, and ontology of divisive public sector rules.

We also raise research questions with cross-cutting relevance to the red tape and

administrative burden research traditions.

Evidence for Practice

•The design and quality of public sector rules have far-reaching consequences for

policy makers, public servants, and citizens.

•In the 1990s, the red tape research agenda linked rule quality with the adminis-

trative values of effectiveness and efficiency. Within the last decade, administra-

tive burden research has highlighted the fundamentally political nature of some

public sector rules.

•Practitioners should assess their issue of concern and identify and draw from

the most relevant of the five distinct but inter-related red tape and administra-

tive burden research themes, namely, administrative performance, behavioral

impact, rule quality, impact on citizen access to public services and benefits, and

administrative system politicization.

•Integrating the insights of the red tape and administrative burden research tra-

ditions can produce a more complete picture of public sector rules that is rele-

vant to both scholars and practitioners.

INTRODUCTION

Rules are an enduring theme of public administration

research. Ideally, rules facilitate administrative and pro-

gram effectiveness. In practice, rules can be divisive, with

their legitimacy an object of debate. Since the 1990s, red

tape, or rules that consume an organization’s resources

but fail to advance its goals (Bozeman, 1993; Bozeman &

Feeney, 2011), has been the dominant theoretical lens

used to study divisive public sector rules. Within the last

decade, however, the administrative burden perspective

has emerged as an alternative approach that focuses on

rule themes overlooked in the red tape literature. Admin-

istrative burden studies prioritize the experience of “oner-

ous”public sector rules on citizens and, in a common

formulation, seek the origins of such rules in the

Received: 25 September 2021 Revised: 20 May 2022 Accepted: 23 May 2022

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13527

296 © 2022 American Society for Public Administration. Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:296–315.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar

machinations of partisan actors rather than the complex

organizational performance and control dynamics that

underlie red tape research (Herd & Moynihan, 2019;

Moynihan et al., 2015). Although administrative burden is

not the first reframing of divisive public sector rule phe-

nomena, its growing popularity demonstrates the utility

that scholars have found in using a political, citizen-

centered research framework.

Breaking new research paths is necessary and desir-

able when the conceptual foundations of existing work

limit further understanding. Conceptual diversification

can also fragment the discipline’s shared vocabulary and

weaken the ability to synthesize new insights with

established knowledge (Pfeffer, 1993; Singh, 1991). Sev-

eral recent studies, authored by domain experts, have

brought the emerging cleavage in the study of divisive

rules to the attention of public administration scholars.

Carrigan, Pandey, and Van Ryzin (2020, p. 51), in an edito-

rial encouraging “consilience”between the red tape and

administrative burden research, suggest that a common

language is needed to “dismantle traditional public

administration topical silos.”George et al. (2021, p. 647)

echo this sentiment, arguing that the “perils of

underdetermination of theory by evidence”prevail when

a diversified conceptual language fails to reflect genuine

empirical diversity in the domain it describes. Madsen,

Mikkelsen, and Moynihan (2022, p. 10) emphasize the dis-

tinctive features and priorities of the red tape and admin-

istrative burden literatures, but also admit that “nothing

stops red tape research from choosing objects other than

public servants.”In another recent take, Baekgaard and

Tankink (2021, p. 2) note that within administrative bur-

den research “the same term is used interchangeably but

with different meanings,”some of which draw upon red

tape themes. This lack of conceptual precision threatens

the coherence of research into divisive public sector rules

and underscores the need for consolidation.

Although red tape and administrative burden are the

flag-bearing concepts, manifold perspectives, assump-

tions, and conflicts exist not only between but within the

two research streams, and this field is complemented fur-

ther by related concepts such as green tape (Baekgaard &

Tankink, 2021; George et al., 2021; Pandey, 2021). We use

the meta-narrative review methodology (Greenhalgh

et al., 2005; Wong et al., 2013) to give an account of this

rich literature. A meta-narrative consists of a self-

consistent set of questions, concepts, theories, and

assumptions, and the meta-narrative review is distin-

guished within the pantheon of systematic review meth-

odologies by its goal to identify narratives and subject

them to mapping, evaluation, and synthesis. Whereas the

generic systematic review addresses narrowly scoped

questions by collating published studies (Greenhalgh

et al., 2018), the meta-narrative review combines “schol-

arly summary”with “interpretation and critique”

(Greenhalgh et al., 2018, p. 2), favors “sense making over

cataloging,”and aims for the production of theory

through careful study and comparison (Dixon-Woods

et al., 2005; Greenhalgh et al., 2009, p. 730). The meta-

narrative approach has been applied in a variety of disci-

plines

1

and is “particularly suited to exploring tensions

and paradoxes between different research traditions and

making sense of ‘conflicting’findings”(Greenhalgh &

Heath, 2010, p. 475). We leverage these strengths of the

methodology throughout our study.

The research questions that scholars ask serve as the

basis for the integration of concepts, theories, and

methods, and research questions are relevant to all study

types. With a divisive rule defined as one for which no

stakeholder consensus exists about the legitimacy or effi-

cacy of the rule, we were guided in our interrogation of

the literature by the following query:

What research questions have been asked

about divisive public sector rules?

Below, we introduce the meta-narrative approach and

describe how we applied it. Our dataset, produced

through a comprehensive search of the English-language

literature, consists of 164 sources published since 2010.

We describe the coding protocol we used to extract

themes, theoretical assumptions, sets of important actors,

and other characteristics from this literature. We identify

five meta-narratives and map them using inductively gen-

erated parameters, and then provide a descriptive synthe-

sis of the origins, impact, and ontology of divisive public

sector rules.

Our study makes three contributions to the literature.

First, we introduce and then apply the meta-narrative

methodology to a core public administration topic and

thereby demonstrate the utility of the method relative to

the more mechanical approach to systematic reviews

popular in the discipline. Second, by identifying and map-

ping the meta-narratives in the red tape and administra-

tive burden literature, we consolidate a diverse set of

findings into a thematically intuitive framework and lay

the foundations for further research development. Third,

our comparative synthesis leverages the mapping of the

meta-narratives to surface theoretically and empirically

relevant points of convergence and divergence in the red

tape and administrative burden literatures. Whereas the

five meta-narratives provide a point of departure for

future research on divisive public sector rules, the issues

raised by their synthesis point to potential paths for this

research to explore.

META-NARRATIVE REVIEW OF THE RED TAPE

AND ADMINISTRATIVE BURDEN RESEARCH

TRADITIONS

Meta-narrative reviews combine the systematicity of the

traditional review with the goals of rich description and

theory construction (Greenhalgh et al., 2005). The

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