Premium
Multiple Dimensions of Bureaucratic Discrimination: Evidence from German Welfare Offices
Author(s) -
Hemker Johannes,
Rink Anselm
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.12312
Subject(s) - bureaucracy , german , welfare , observational study , ethnic group , quality (philosophy) , public economics , relevance (law) , coding (social sciences) , demographic economics , political science , economics , social psychology , psychology , sociology , law , statistics , social science , geography , philosophy , mathematics , archaeology , epistemology , politics
Abstract A growing experimental literature uses response rates to fictional requests to measure discrimination against ethnic minorities. This article argues that restricting attention to response rates can lead to faulty inferences about substantive discrimination depending on how response dummies are correlated with other response characteristics. We illustrate the relevance of this problem by means of a conjoint experiment among all German welfare offices, in which we randomly varied five traits and designed requests to allow for a substantive coding of response quality. We find that response rates are statistically indistinguishable across treatment conditions. However, putative non‐Germans receive responses of significantly lower quality, potentially deterring them from applying for benefits. We also find observational evidence suggesting that discrimination is more pronounced in welfare offices run by local governments than in those embedded in the national bureaucracy. We discuss implications for the study of equality in the public sphere.