Does Administrative Burden Affect Welfare Recipients’ Institutional Trust and Political Participation? Evidence from a Recall Experiment

Abstract

A key condition of receiving welfare benefits is ongoing compliance with verification tasks, compulsory meeting attendance, and activation requirements. Bridging literatures on policy feedback and administrative burden research, we argue that such encounters with bureaucracy shape policy recipients’ views and reactions toward democratic institutions and hypothesize three forms of potential reactions to burdensome bureaucratic encounters: Decreases in institutional trust, general political participation, and specific participation in the policy subsystem contributing directly to the bureaucratic experiences. Using a pre-registered survey experiment with responses from 2,212 Danish employment insurance recipients and random assignment to recall of either of three forms of burdensome experiences, we find little support for this assertion. At most, some forms of burdensome experiences have small effects on specific participation. We discuss the implications of this finding for the design of public policies, and for the policy feedback and administrative burden literatures.