Conference Agenda

Administrative burden has created resistance between the policies established to support citizens and the citizens' needs. In fact, it is deeply rooted in laws, organizational rules, and daily implementation practices (Herd et al., 2023). Burdens tend to be enforced more easily on those who are politically powerless or unpopular and significantly affect those with lower financial resources and human capital assets (Moynihan et al., 2015). Immigrant women, who are at the crossroads of immigration status, are among the groups that encounter administrative burdens. Unfortunately, existing literature and empirical research have inadequately focused on them. In 2024, Finland’s immigration was primarily driven by employment and study-related migration, with a total of 12,498 work-based residence permit applications (excluding EU citizens) and 11,749 study-based permit applications submitted in the first nine months of the year. This paper focuses on two specific groups of immigrant women—students and workers—and delves into their experiences using immigration services in two neighboring Finnish cities: Helsinki and Turku. To ensure a thorough understanding of the topic and to reach saturation, approximately 30 interviews with immigrant women were conducted (15 in Helsinki and 15 in Turku). This study aims to address gaps in the literature and contribute to the theoretical advancement of administrative burden theory in the field of public management.

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.