Does religious bias shape access to public services? A large-scale audit experiment among street-level bureaucrats

Abstract

Despite growing descriptive evidence of discrimination against minority religious groups and atheists in the United States, little experimental work exists studying whether individuals face differential barriers to receiving public services depending on their religious affiliation. Here we report results from a large-scale audit study of street-level bureaucrats in the American public school system. We emailed the principals of more than 45,000 public schools and asked for a meeting, randomly assigning the religious affiliation/non-affiliation of the family. To get at potential mechanisms, we also randomly assigned belief intensity.We find evidence of substantial discrimination against Muslims and atheists. These individuals are substantially less likely to receive a response, with discrimination growing when they signal that their beliefs are more intense. Protestants and Catholics face no discrimination unless they signal that their religious beliefs are intense. Our ?findings suggest that minority religious groups and atheists face important barriers to equal representation in the public arena.

The Unequal Distribution of Opportunity: A National Audit Study of Bureaucratic Discrimination in Primary School Access

“…It is generally difficult to separate out bias against Middle Eastern names from a more general anti-Muslim bias. Pfaff et al (2020) find that putative Muslim parents with non-Arabic names still faced discrimination, being about 5 percentage points less likely to receive a response from U.S. school principals.…”

A Systematic Review of Field Experiments in Public Administration

“…Indeed, some audit studies achieve very high statistical power, which may mean that they take up a lot of time on behalf of participants. For instance, Pfaff et al (2019) examine whether religious bias shapes access to public services. To do so, they sent out fake requests to 45,000 principals in public schools.…”

Do public officials exhibit social class biases when they handle casework? Evidence from multiple correspondence experiments

“…In these experiments, a confederate emailed legislators with simple requests—the first asking for help registering to vote and the second requesting a brief in-person meeting—and randomly varied the confederate’s stated occupation. Experiment 3 focused on public school principals , consequential local “street-level bureaucrats” who also have frequent contact with citizens [10]. In this larger-scale experiment, confederates asked principals for information on school music and art programs.…”

“…In all of these experiments, we randomly varied whether public officials received correspondence from a more or less affluent person by varying the individual’s stated occupation (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or biographical narrative (Experiment 3). This follows the approach of similar recent audit studies on racial, ethnic, age, and gender bias [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15], which typically use relatively small manipulations (e.g. changing the name of the sender).…”