State deniers’ effect on public administration: Administrative burden turned upside down
Susanne Hadorn1, Bettina STAUFFER3, Johanna Hornung2, Fritz Sager3
1University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland; 2University of Lausanne, Switzerland; 3University of Bern, Switzerland
State deniers create burden for the public administration. In this concept building paper, we address three research questions: (1) How do SLB perceive state deniers? (2) How do SLB deal with state deniers? (3) What do SLB need to be able to deal efficiently with state deniers?
In Europe, studies show that citizens are becoming more skeptical of various government agencies. Trust in institutions is on the decline. Some citizens do not only hold negative views towards the state but actively resist. This means that they do not recognize the state as a sovereign authority and refuse to pay taxes or bills, for example. From a scientific point of view, we cannot yet systematically answer the question of how exactly state deniers influence the public administration and its employees (i.e., SLB) in their work. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that the additional work caused by state deniers is considerable for the authorities.
An extensive body of literature exists on the issue of administrative burden. Extant research has so far focused on the effects of burden for citizens. This includes, among others, the specific perspective on burden as designed from the public administration – intentionally or unintentionally – to influence citizens’ behavior or achieve specific policy goals. In our study, we argue that for the understanding of state deniers’ effect on public administration, we need to reverse this perspective. To our knowledge, research has not yet looked at what happens when citizens introduce burden for the state. In view of the growing debates on state denial, we consider this perspective relevant for research.
To systematically capture the phenomenon, we aim to conceptualize an additional claim about administrative burden in stating that burdens may have two-sided effects on the citizen-state interactions.
We answer our research questions by referring to the policy capacity framework based on Wu et al. (2015), and the three families of coping strategies by Tummers et al. (2015). The former provides a theoretical foundation to systematically investigate three types of capacities (analytical, operational, political) at the institutional/macro level, the organizational level, and the individual level that are “necessary to perform policy functions” (Wu et al. 2015, 3). The latter enables researchers to study the behavior of SLB in their daily work with citizens by classifying this behavior into three families of coping strategies: moving towards clients, moving away from clients, moving against clients.
We conducted semi-structured interviews among various administrative units in Switzerland (police, debt collectors, public transportation and the judiciary) and evaluate the data using qualitative content analysis. Our preliminary findings show that there is neither excessive demand nor complete routine in dealing with state deniers. Certain procedures are in place and some measures have been taken by the public administration to ensure more efficient handling. Interviewees differ in their definition of state denial. While there is agreement that the work is made more difficult by people who refuse to cooperate, the extent differs across policy sectors, which also demands diverse strategies in dealing with non-cooperation.
Shades of Citizenship: Cumulative Administrative Burden of Public Services in Gated Communities
Muhammad Azfar Nisar, Ayesha Masood
Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
Research on administrative burdens has made valuable contributions to a study of state-led service provision, focusing on individual access to individual public services. However, this framework has not yet been used to analyze the cumulative impact of different governance models (such as private provision of public services) on citizens. This article addresses these gaps through a qualitative study of the cumulative administrative burden of public service access in private housing societies in Lahore, Pakistan. Our findings show that property ownership, residential status, and socioeconomic class structure access to public services within private housing societies. It further highlights how cumulative burdens—general costs associated with public service provision through a model of governance—produce shades of citizenship, stratifying residents into hierarchies of belonging and exclusion. By analyzing how geography and governance intersect to generate inequities, the article extends administrative burden research beyond single policy studies, demonstrates the spatial heterogeneities in burdens, and contributes to debates on citizenship, inequality, and urban governance.
Weaponizing Administrative Burden: Street level Bureaucrats, Third parties and Policy Implementation
Ayesha MASOOD, Muhammad Azfar Nisar
Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
How and why administrative burdens are created is an ongoing question in public administration research. The most common answer is that the burdens are created through state actions, as part of policy making by other means, to re/distribute resources, control access and limit citizenship. The second source which creates administrative burdens is infrastructural actions: burdens created through the actions of implementing infrastructure, including but not limited to frontline bureaucracy, material and physical structures, and non-human actors and processes. Finally, the last source of administrative burdens, which thus far has received relatively less attention in the literature are the third parties, non-state actors who may or may not be involved in the service delivery, but can never-the-less impact the administrative burdens experienced by the citizens. Based on this, we ask: How third party-actors can impact the implementation of public policies? What is the impact of this influence on equity and access to public rights and services?
Methods and Findings
We answer this question by examining the experiences of women trying to access various citizenship and state documents in Pakistan. The data is collected through in-depth ethnographic interviews with 30 women who were in various stages of divorce and custody proceedings.
Our research indicates that the administrative burden of many state documents including family registration, citizenship, marriage and divorce certificates is already gendered. Policy design and implementation architecture positions men as default heads of household, giving them overall control over access to several state documents. In our data, men especially husbands of the participants used this administrative burden to curtail women’s access to basic documents. Men can weaponize the compliance costs of documents by refusing to register marriage, obtain family certificates and legalize the divorce. They can also withhold documents like their own ID card, needed by women to apply for many state documents. Men can also weaponize learning costs by deliberately providing misinformation about documentation requirements. Lastly, they can also weaponize psychological costs by using the administrative processes to force women to stay in abusive marriages or to stay in contact with them when they do not want to. Similarly, they can also use their control and custody of documents to exert control over access to education and healthcare for their families.
Relevance
This research has multiple important contributions towards equity in public policy. First it provides an empirical investigation of gendered administrative burdens, and the role of culture in experience of administrative burdens. Second, our research also investigates how patriarchal gendered relations are written into the implementation structures, creating an almost invisible subtext of inequity in seemingly egalitarian policies.
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