Racial Discrimination and Street‐Level Managers: Performance, Publicness, and Group Bias

Abstract

This article broadens our understanding of street‐level governance by examining how citizen performance, organizational publicness, and group bias moderate racial discrimination among street‐level managers (SLMs). We examine this topic with an experiment in which we requested enrollment information from public and charter school principals while randomly assigning a putative student's race and ability. As expected, SLMs discriminated based on race, and positive performance information mitigated this discrimination. Surprisingly, negative performance information also reduced discrimination. Turning to publicness, we find no evidence that less public organizations (charter schools) exacerbated anti‐Black discrimination. Finally, we show that White SLMs discriminated against Black citizens. However, Black SLMs worked in more administratively difficult settings and, perhaps as a result, responded at lower rates; thus, Black citizens were equally likely to receive responses from White and Black SLMs. Therefore, improving access to public agencies may require representativeness and support for SLMs working in challenging organizational environments.

Discrimination in marketized welfare services: a field experiment on Swedish schools

“…We identify only four published discrimination experiments on public and private welfare services operating within competitive environments (Jilke et al, 2018;Milkman et al, 2015;Brown and Hilbig, 2021;Oberfield and Incantalupo, 2021). All but one of these studies (Jilke et al, 2018) focus on the US and only two of them cover publicly financed services, reducing their generalizability outside these areas.…”

“…However, only a small number of published experiments on the subject exist. Interestingly, the findings are mixed, not always indicating that private providers are more likely than public providers to discriminate (Jilke et al, 2018;Milkman et al, 2015;Brown and Hilbig, 2021;Oberfield and Incantalupo, 2021).…”

The End of Evidence‐Based Everything at the Close of the Global Chapter: Plotting the Next Step on the Spiral

“…Results from an online sample of U.S. adults show that, in both cases, the public servant helping people with characteristics similar to their own was judged to be unfair, driven by the observations of people whose characteristics were different. Oberfield and Incantalupo (2021) take a street-level view of governance, examining how citizen performance, organizational publicness, and group bias moderate racial discrimination among streetlevel managers (SLMs). They utilize an experimental design in which enrollment information was requested from public and charter school principals while randomly assigning a putative student's race and ability.…”

Resistance or Capitulation? How Discrete Emotions Shape Citizens’ Interactions With the Administrative State

“… 12. While we would ideally have liked to examine associations across specific racial and ethnic groups (e.g., whether the associations are different for African-American respondents compared to Hispanic respondents), we were limited in our statistical power and precision. Therefore, we focused on a simpler comparison between non-White respondents, who face substantial structural marginalization in the context of schooling and financial aid, compared to their White counterparts (Oberfield and Incantalupo, 2021). …”