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Does Race Affect Access to Government Services? An Experiment Exploring Street‐Level Bureaucrats and Access to Public Housing
Author(s) -
Einstein Katherine Levine,
Glick David M.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12252
Subject(s) - bureaucracy , white (mutation) , government (linguistics) , race (biology) , context (archaeology) , affect (linguistics) , politics , political science , tone (literature) , demographic economics , public administration , social psychology , psychology , sociology , law , geography , gender studies , economics , linguistics , philosophy , communication , art , biochemistry , chemistry , literature , archaeology , gene
While experimental studies of local election officials have found evidence of racial discrimination, we know little about whether these biases manifest in bureaucracies that provide access to valuable government programs and are less tied to politics. We address these issues in the context of affordable housing programs using a randomized field experiment. We explore responsiveness to putative white, black, and Hispanic requests for aid in the housing application process. In contrast to prior findings, public housing officials respond at equal rates to black and white email requests. We do, however, find limited evidence of responsiveness discrimination toward Hispanics. Moreover, we observe substantial differences in email tone. Hispanic housing applicants were 20 percentage points less likely to be greeted by name than were their black and white counterparts. This disparity in tone is somewhat more muted in more diverse locations, but it does not depend on whether a housing official is Hispanic.