It’s Not Merely About the Content: How Rules Are Communicated Matters to Perceived Administrative Burden
Martin Baekgaard, Matthias Döring, and Mette Kjærgaard Thomsen 'It´s not merely about the content: How rules are communicated matters to perceived administrative burden', Public Administration Review, Forthcoming
48 Pages Posted: 31 Oct 2023
Date Written: January 27, 2023
Abstract
Research suggests that citizens often abstain from taking up benefits for which they are eligible because of the costs of learning about how to apply for and the expected compliance and psychological costs associated with taking up benefits. But to what extent can perceptions and expectations of such burdens be altered simply by changing the way rules are communicated? Bridging literatures on administrative burden, communication theory, and cognitive psychology, we theorize and test the causal impact (using a pre-registered randomized survey experiment (N=2,243)) of two prominent aspects of rule communication: information structure and bureaucratic language. Our findings lend support to the expectation that especially bureaucratic language influences citizens’ perceptions of learning costs as well as their expectations of compliance – and to a lesser extent psychological – costs, even when the content of the rules communicated is the same.
Keywords: Administrative burden, Rule Communication, Bureaucratic language, Bureaucratese, Information structure
JEL Classification: I38
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation