Abstract

Despite an explicit focus on citizens' experiences with public service, research on administrative burden has done little to show how burdensome experiences affect citizen’s psychological beliefs. This limits our understanding of administrative burdens and their impact in public policy. Through a survey experiment on 1.116 unemployment insurance fund beneficiaries in Denmark, we test whether activating impressions from onerous experiences with the unemployment system affects psychological beliefs central to job search and (un)employment: job search locus of control and attribution of unemployment responsibility. We show that experiences of onerous demands and complicated rules externalize respondents' locus of control and increase their propensity to attribute responsibility for unemployment to their unemployment insurance fund and its employees. Thus, experiencing administrative burdens, even from policies ostensibly designed to make beneficiaries master their situation, may shift control beliefs and responsibility attribution outward rather than inward.

摘要

尽管明确关注公民在公共服务方面的经历，但对行政负担的研究几乎没有说明繁重的经历如何影响公民的心理信念。这限制了我们对行政负担及其对公共政策的影响的理解。通过对丹麦 1.116 名失业保险基金受益人进行的一项调查实验，我们测试了来自失业系统繁重经历的激活印象是否会影响求职和（失业）就业的核心心理信念：求职控制点和失业责任归属。我们表明，繁重的需求和复杂规则的经历使受访者的 控制点，并增加他们将失业责任归咎于失业保险基金及其雇员的倾向。因此，承受行政负担，即使是表面上旨在使受益人掌握其处境的政策，也可能会向外而不是向内转移控制信念和责任归属。