Administrative burden (Herd and Moynihan)
The costs a person pays to get help from a public program, apart from whether they qualify. Herd and Moynihan name three: learning costs (finding out what exists and whether it applies), compliance costs (forms, proofs, interviews, waiting and renewals) and psychological costs (stigma, stress and the loss of control in dealing with an office that decides).
What drives it
The burden filters who gets help, and it filters by time, stamina and skill with paperwork as well as by need. Useful for identification because a parent who never finished the childcare subsidy form may blame themselves, while the process may be built in a way that wears down the people with the least time and money first.
How it shows
Work
Spending a lunch break on hold with a benefits line. Taking unpaid time off for an in-person appointment that could have been a form. Losing a shift because a caseworker interview was set for eight in the morning.
Relationships
Needing an ex-partner's paperwork to prove income or custody, and having to ask for it. Asking a friend to help read a letter and feeling exposed. Kids waiting in an office for two hours after school.
Self
Notice the letters you haven't opened, the form half filled in on the counter, and what your body does when an envelope from an agency arrives. Notice whether you have stopped applying for something you probably qualify for.
What tells it apart
Ostrich effect: That pattern is a person avoiding information they expect to be bad, such as a bank balance. Administrative burden is a cost built into the process itself, though a heavy process can lead people to stop opening the letters.
Money shame: Money shame is a personal sense of being bad or exposed over money. The psychological costs of administrative burden include stigma, and they come from how a program is designed and talked about, so many people in the same office would feel them.
Procrastination: Procrastination is putting off a task one could do now, against one's own interest. With administrative burden the delay is more likely to come from missing documents, unclear rules or office hours that clash with work.
A test
Ask the person to list each step a program asked of them, from finding out it existed to the last renewal, and the hours each took. Many steps, repeated proofs, or a step that needed time off work may point to burden in the process, whatever the person's own habits.
Questions to carry
- Which form or letter am I avoiding right now, and which step in it stops me?
- What do I tell myself about why I haven't applied?
How strong the research is
moderate. In an IRS field experiment with more than 35,000 Californians eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit who had not answered earlier letters (Bhargava and Manoli, American Economic Review, 2015), 17% claimed after the standard notice and 31% after one that stated the benefit clearly, while messages meant to ease stigma had no effect. Moynihan, Herd and Harvey (2015) traced how Wisconsin governors raised and lowered the paperwork for Medicaid, and how one added verification step cut enrollment. When pandemic rules on continuous Medicaid coverage ended, KFF counted at least 25 million people disenrolled by September 2024, 69% of them for procedural reasons such as an unfinished renewal, and the other 31% found ineligible. The claim that burdens fall hardest on people under scarcity, illness or stress (Christensen and colleagues, Public Administration Review, 2020) is an argument built partly on the scarcity research, whose headline lab result has not replicated, so it is less settled than the evidence on take-up.
Where it comes from
Donald Moynihan, Pamela Herd and Hope Harvey, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2015. Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan, Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, Russell Sage Foundation, 2018