The Cost of Service and Street-level Bureaucrats’ Coping Strategy: A Field Experiment. with Jiaqi Liang; Sanghee Park.
Abstract
This study explores how workload and representation influence government officials’ responses to public inquiries. Public inquiries serve as a formal tool for citizens to raise concerns, request information, and hold government accountable, while also serving as a communication channel between bureaucrats and citizens. Using a correspondence experiment, we examine whether public managers in the U.S. Superfund program respond, and if so, how their responses vary across the levels of perceived administrative efforts demanded by the inquiries and the demographic congruence between the manager and the citizen-requesters. We find that bureaucrats are significantly more likely to respond to low-workload requests, consistent with the street-level coping behavior, and female managers are more sensitive to perceived workload. The positive effect of gender matching is not observed for both responsiveness and willingness to engage with the resident who submitted the inquiry. However, we find a modest but robust effect of gender incongruence, suggesting that managers are more willing to engage with requesters of the opposite gender once they commit to respond.