Inequality effects of bureaucracies’ coping with overload

Globally, a steady growth in regulatrory demands without a corresponding increase in administrative capacities is leading to increasingly overburdened bureaucracies. Bureaucracies manage this overload through various strategies, including policy triage, where easy, quick, and salient cases are prioritized. While these dynamics are well documented, the impact of bureaucracies’ coping with overload on different population segments remains poorly understood. This paper argues that some forms of coping disproportionately affect disadvantaged citizen-clients who represent complex and/or time-consuming cases, often with little visibility in media and politics. By combing the literatures on street-level coping, social capital, and social construction of target groups, we theorize the effects of bureaucracies’ coping with overload on administrative burdens and perceived bureaucratic discrimination. Empirically, we triangulate and match a representative survey of public administrations (dataset 1) in the German states of Baden-Württemberg (N=676, response rate: 60%) and Rhineland- Palatine (N=211, response rate: 85%) with a representative population survey of citizen-clients with recent interaction with administrative units (dataset 2) in the same two Geman states (N= 1.400). The results show that even in a high-capacity country like Germany, certain coping mechanisms, such as policy triage, are already widespread and, importantly, exacerbate existing inequalities in the population. These inequality effects require more scholarly and political attention. Their ramifications for citizen-state relations are largely unknown, but unlikely to be trivial.