Bureaucratic (In)competence in a Federalist System: How Administrative Burden Impacts Participation in U.S. Elections

Abstract

Federal public policies in the United States are often implemented by state and local governments who have significant power over their administration. This creates substantial variation across the country in the administration of government programs. It is well-established that individuals who interact with government programs subsequently participate in politics at levels different from before, though most prior research studies the effect of simply being a program recipient. My dissertation examines the relationship between lived experiences and interactions with government programs and downstream political participation.

In the first paper, I discuss the theoretical framework that I test in the two papers that follow. I add important scope conditions to designate when we should expect to observe policy feedback effects of administrative burden. The program must be visible, meaning that the actor administering it ("the government") must be apparent to ordinary citizens as well as program recipients, and benefits must provide basic human needs such as food, supplementary income, health care, housing, or education. Most typically these will be means-tested programs. I then explain the pathway through which administrative burden of a government program influences political participation. I assert that administrative burden creates cognitive effects on both potential program recipients and mass publics, and that there is an additional hurdle between program administration and political participation: electoral burden, the burden of registering to vote and voting itself. Finally, I construct a scaffolding for measuring administrative burden. Administrative burden varies in four key ways: (1) across geographies—due to the nature of federalism; (2) over time—as programs or political environments change; (3) by program—depending on policy design; and (4) across individuals—since burdens are distributive. This implies that precise measures of burden will be local, time-varying, policy-specific, and ideally individualized. In the subsequent papers, I utilize this framework to measure the administrative burden of Medicaid and of elections.

In the second paper, I examine how the administrative burden of Medicaid, a means-tested federal program administered largely by the states, influences mass-level political participation. Leveraging the passage of the Affordable Care Act and subsequent Medicaid expansion in many states, I employ a difference-in-differences research design to estimate the effects of Medicaid administrative burden on voter turnout. Using my original measures of Medicaid administrative burden, I demonstrate that policy administration of Medicaid played a role in shaping mass voter turnout in recent federal and state-level elections.

In the third paper, I use a similar research design to demonstrate that experiencing greater electoral burden in registering to vote and voting itself negatively impacts the likelihood of being registered or voting. I exploit over-time change in election administration measures in U.S. states between 2010 and 2020 to assess their effects on voter participation rates. Combining my measures of Medicaid and electoral burdens, I demonstrate that the relationship between electoral burdens and voter turnout trumps that of Medicaid administrative burden, though this program's burden still has a significant, though small, effect on turnout. Overall, the data support my theory of electoral burden being a hurdle that citizens must overcome on the track from means-tested program administration to political participation. By incorporating the impact of electoral burden on political participation as done in this paper, future scholarly work will be able to more precisely isolate the impact of other policies on democratic participation.