Punishment on the Frontlines of Public Service Delivery

Abstract

In the wake of neoliberal public policy reforms, public welfare programs have become more directive in setting behavioral expectations for clients and more punitive in responding to client noncompliance. Many public welfare programs give public employees discretionary authority to dispense sanctions when clients do not follow or comply with the policies and procedures required to receive the welfare benefits. At the same time, research shows that public employees’ use of discretion in decision-making that affects clients can occasionally be marked by nontrivial racial biases and disparities. Combining these insights and drawing on the Racial Classification Model (RCM) for a theoretical model, this article examines how public employees’ decisions to sanction clients are shaped by client ethnicity in the Scandinavian welfare state of Denmark. With Danish employment agencies as our empirical setting, we present findings from two complimentary studies that expand our understanding of the scope conditions of the RCM. In Study 1, we present survey experimental evidence that municipal employment caseworkers are more likely to recommend sanctions for clients of ethnic minority (Middle-Eastern origin) than for clients of the ethnic majority (Danish origin). In Study 2, we triangulate the findings from Study 1 with analyses of agency-level administrative data from the national employment program. Demonstrating how client ethnicity shapes caseworkers’ decisions to sanction in a non-U.S. context adds important knowledge about the generalizability of both the RCM and extant empirical research on racial disparity in public employee decision-making to different subjects and settings. Moreover, we use the survey experiment to investigate how three caseworker characteristics–gender, ethnicity, and work experience–condition the relationship between client ethnicity and caseworkers’ decision to sanction clients. While previous research has extended the RCM with insights on the moderating effects of client characteristics, we thus contribute with new knowledge about the moderating effects of caseworker characteristics. We find no moderation effects for caseworker gender or ethnicity, but work experience appears to diminish the influence of client ethnicity on the caseworkers’ sanctioning decision. Overall, our studies offer support that ethnic minority clients (clients of Middle-Eastern origin) are more likely to be punished for infraction of policy than ethnic majority clients (clients of Danish origin)–and that caseworker work experience mitigates part of this bias. We discuss the implications of these findings for future public administration research and policy.