This study examines how individuals assess administrative burdens and how these views change over time within the context of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).
This study examines how bureaucratic interactions differ among public assistance programs—WIC, SNAP, and Medicaid—highlighting variations in participant experiences and the psychological costs associated with each.
This paper argues that a human rights framework could help orient the research on artificial intelligence away from machines and the risks of their biases, and towards humans and the risks to their rights, helping to center the conversation around who is harmed, what harms they face, and how those harms may be mitigated.
This study assesses five commercial RIdV solutions for equity across demographic groups and finds that two are equitable, while two have inequitable performance for certain demographics.
This article analyzes the strategic use of public policy as a tool for reshaping public opinion. Though progressive revisionists in the 1990s argued that reforming welfare could produce a public more willing to invest in anti-poverty efforts, welfare reform in the 1990s did little to shift public opinion. This study investigates the general conditions under which mass feedback effects should be viewed as more or less likely.
The Better Government Lab at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University has developed a new scale for measuring the experience of burden when accessing public benefits. They offer both a three-item scale and a single-item scale, which can be utilized for any public benefit program. The shorter scales provide a less burdensome way to measure by requiring less information from users.
This foundational article develops the concept of administrative burden, defining it as the learning, psychological, and compliance costs individuals face when interacting with government, and argues that these burdens are often shaped by political choices.
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
This study investigates how administrative burdens influence differential receipt of income transfers after a family member loses a job, looking at Unemployment Insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
This article explores how anticipatory logics—drawing from foresight, futures thinking, and design—are shaping the future of government by creating space for innovative policy approaches, public participation, and proactive governance.
This academic paper examines predictive optimization, a category of decision-making algorithms that use machine learning (ML) to predict future outcomes of interest about individuals. Through this examination, the authors explore how predictive optimization can raise concerns that make its use illegitimate and challenge claims about predictive optimization's accuracy, efficiency, and fairness.
This article explores how legal documents can be treated like software programs, using methods like software testing and mutation analysis to enhance AI-driven statutory analysis, aiding legal decision-making and error detection.
Algorithmic impact assessments (AIAs) are an emergent form of accountability for organizations that build and deploy automated decision-support systems. This academic paper explores how to co-construct impacts that closely reflects harms, and emphasizes the need for input of various types of expertise and affected communities.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)
