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 study examines the adoption and implementation of AI chatbots in U.S. state governments, identifying key drivers, challenges, and best practices for public sector chatbot deployment.
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.
A unified taxonomy and tooling suite that consolidates AI risks across frameworks and links them to datasets, benchmarks, and mitigation strategies to support practical AI governance.
A national survey of low-wage workers showing that administrative burdens in SNAP and Medicaid are common and strongly linked to food hardship, healthcare hardship, and chronic illness.
This research paper examines how stigma shapes participation in U.S. social safety net programs and influences public support for benefit design and access.
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 academic article develops a framework for evaluating whether and how automated decision-making welfare systems introduce new harms and burdens for claimants, focusing on an example case from Germany.
This paper introduces a framework for algorithmic auditing that supports artificial intelligence system development end-to-end, to be applied throughout the internal organization development lifecycle.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)
This research summary presents findings from a randomized controlled trial demonstrating how mRelief’s simplified SNAP application significantly increases application rates among eligible individuals.
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
