The Burden of Bad Intentions: Analyzing Politicized Administrative Burdens

Abstract

Using a survey of nearly 2,000 federal government employees, we test the extent to which civil servants are willing to use their position to impose administrative burdens on political opponents. Such an act would create a burden of bad intentions. Rather than discovering that administrators are partisan actors through their use of burdens, we find that federal public employees support administrative burdens when they reduce fraud and waste. Furthermore, these civil servants are also not politically motivated. More precisely, federal government employees do not support administrative burdens that will give unequal benefits to members of their own political party or that will create uneven challenges for members of the opposition. Therefore, we theorize that administrators’ decisions relating to burden are motivated by a general concern for efficiency and ethics, even as decisions related to compliance and discretion may be divided into partisan lines.