Most research on administrative burdens focuses on measuring their impact on citizens’ access to services and benefits. This article fills a theoretical gap and provides a framework for understanding the organizational origins of administrative burden. Based on an extensive literature review, the explanations are organized according to their level of intentionality (deliberate hidden politics or unintended consequences) and their level of formality (designed into formal procedures or caused by informal organizational practices). The analysis suggests that administrative burdens are often firmly rooted in a political economy of deeply engrained structures and behavioral patterns in public administration.

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The notion of ‘governance’ is often studied from a public management perspective and is associated with the image of a modest or even retreating state. However, ‘governance’ can also be studied from a political perspective, which focuses on issues of power and interests in governance practices. This shifts attention from a modest state to the techniques governments use to step into society and influence citizen behaviour. Whether in crime policy, youth policy or public health policy, traditional government techniques such as penalising behaviour or compensating harm are complemented by governance techniques to manage citizen responsibility and solidarity in the face of social risks.This article deals with the question of how politicians and governments publicly frame and legitimise a new realm of state intervention dedicated to enticing, persuading and nudging citizens to ‘take responsibility’ in producing public value. An analysis of Dutch political discourse in the first decade of the twenty-first century reveals the mechanisms by which government justifies its new approach to social issues. The traditional connotations of the notions ‘responsibility’ and ‘solidarity’ are transformed in order to mobilise citizens and approach them as both part of the problem and part of the solution to various social issues. An analysis of Dutch youth policy shows how this brings about a politicisation of citizen behaviour and implicates citizens as co-operators of political will formation.

Recent studies have demonstrated that administrative burdens often reinforce existing social inequalities. However, less attention has been paid to explaining which factors cause variation in people's experience of administrative burden. This article builds upon an emerging body of literature on citizen factors to make two contributions. First, a theoretical framework is constructed to provide a coherent overview of existing economic (cost–benefit analyses and poverty costs) and behavioural explanations (human capital and decision‐making bias) for the unequal distribution of administrative burden. Furthermore, policy feedback is suggested as a possible intermediating variable to understand variations in people's capacity and willingness to engage in state‐citizen interactions and the bigger bite of administrative burden in low‐trust contexts. Second, a mixed method case study of non‐participation in Argentina's conditional cash transfer program is used to illustrate the relevance of the identified explanations prior to state‐citizen interaction.

Summary Latin American bureaucracies are notorious for their inefficiency and opacity, yet there is very little empirical research done on what exactly constitutes the “bureaucratic experience” for citizens and what the costs of bureaucratic dysfunction are. To improve our understanding of this topic, 5 cases of Mexican citizens' encounters with public bureaucracies are used to develop the notion of “low‐trust bureaucracy”: public organisations in which access to services is unreliable and the levels of control towards both citizens and bureaucrats are excessive. This bottom‐up analysis of administrative practices contributes to our understanding of the ineffectiveness of government programmes and services, but also of how bureaucracies in developing countries amplify social inequality rather than function as a social equaliser. Furthermore, this article adds new insights to the existing understanding of administrative burdens as a result of either political tactics or mere benign neglect. The data presented here suggest that structural and intractable characteristics of the broader administrative context, such as authoritarian legacies, can produce behavioural patterns that shift bureaucratic attention away from a fair and efficient service provision.