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
Well-designed, user-focused tools that allow for simple application are key to ensuring that families most in need receive the Child Tax Credit. Reaching these households will require a robust effort from the IRS to create user-friendly tools in partnership with organizations with a direct connection to eligible recipients.
The OECD report explores the concept of "Rules as Code" (RaC), proposing a transformation in government rulemaking by developing machine-consumable regulations alongside human-readable versions.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
The exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers—predominantly African Americans—from the 1935 Social Security Act's unemployment insurance program is analyzed as a result of international policy diffusion rather than solely domestic racial politics.
This article examines how the decentralization of safety net programs after welfare reform has led to growing inequality in benefit generosity and access across U.S. states.
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.
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 study examines how providing information about administrative burden influences public support for government programs like TANF, showing that awareness of these burdens can increase favorability toward the programs and their recipients.
This resource is a research paper examining the role of the public safety net in insuring job losers against income loss, analyzing which government programs provide financial support and how benefits vary based on pre-job loss income levels.
This paper analyzes the unique challenges of conducting participatory design in large-scale public projects, focusing on stakeholder management, fostering engagement, and integrating participatory methods into institutional transformation.
This paper examines three key questions in participatory HCI: who initiates, directs, and benefits from user participation; in what forms it occurs; and how control is shared with users, while addressing conceptual, ethical, and pragmatic challenges, and suggesting future research directions.
Accounting for the strong effects of health care access, this study finds that SNAP is associated with reduced hospitalization in dually eligible older adults. Policies to increase SNAP participation and benefit amounts in eligible older adults may reduce hospitalizations and health care costs for older dual eligible adults living in the community.
