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

Abstract

Administrators can use their discretion to discriminate in the provision of public services via two mechanisms.They make decisions to allocate public services, allowing them to discriminate via allocative exclusion. They can also discriminate by targeting administrative burdens toward outgroups to make bureaucratic processes more onerous. While prior audit studies only examine the use of administrative burdens, we offer evidence of both mechanisms. We sent a request to all Danish primary schools (N = 1,698) from an ingroup (a typical Danish name) and outgroup (a Muslim name) father asking if it was possible to move his child to the school. While both groups received similar response rates, we find large differences in discrimination via allocative exclusion: Danes received a clear acceptance 25% of the time, compared to 15% for Muslims. Muslims also faced greater administrative burdens in the form of additional questions.

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

“…The results from our logit analyses are presented as odds ratios in Appendix A. In addition, because it is common for audit students to present average treatment effects using ordinary least squares (OLS) (Bergman and McFarlin 2018; Butler and Broockman 2011; Olsen, Kyhse‐Andersen, and Moynihan 2020), we present OLS coefficients from this analysis in the appendix. As readers will see, our results are robust across these specifications.…”

“…The benefits of this approach over observational studies are clear: While observational studies can highlight concerning trends and correlations, field experiments and audit studies can more credibly articulate causal claims (Hess, Hanmer, and Nickerson 2016). As such, audit studies have proliferated and are now a relatively established method for studying racial and ethnic discrimination across the globe (Gaddis 2015; Olsen, Kyhse‐Andersen, and Moynihan 2020; Pfaff et al 2020; Slough 2020).…”

“…Recent audit studies reveal disconcerting evidence of racial and ethnic discrimination in public agencies (Einstein and Glick 2017; Giulietti, Tonin, and Vlassopoulos 2019; Jilke, Van Dooren, and Rys 2018; Olsen, Kyhse‐Andersen, and Moynihan 2020; White, Nathan, and Faller 2015). This article contributes to our understanding of this problem in two ways.…”

A quasi-experimental study of ethnic and gender bias in university grading

“…The father's name was randomly assigned a typical Danish name or a typical Muslim name. Not only was the acceptance rate significantly lower for inquiries from the supposed Muslim father but they were also faced with greater administrative hurdles in the form of more follow up questions and requests for personal interviews [30].…”

Behavioural governance in the policy process: introduction to the special issue

“…BPA research explores cognitive and decision biases amongst bureaucrats, as well as interactions between bureaucrats and citizens, highlighting issues such as policy alienation, coping, and the processing of performance information by both bureaucrats and citizens (see for example Baekgaard et al, 2019;Baviskar & Winter, 2017;Borrelli & Lindberg, 2018;Hallsworth et al, 2018;Harrits, 2019;James & Van Ryzin, 2017;Loyens, 2015;Thomann et al, 2018;Tummers, 2017). Work in the BPA tradition also explores bureaucratic stereotyping (Harrits, 2019;Moseley & Thomann, 2021), discrimination (Akram, 2018;Hardin & Banaji, 2013;Olsen et al, 2021), and the psychological effects of public service failure. New research is also emerging on how to mitigate cognitive and decision biases amongst actors in the bureaucracy including civil servants and public managers (Bellé & Cantarelli, 2017;Brest, 2013;Cantarelli et al, 2020;Hallsworth et al, 2018).…”