DONDENA Seminar - Eva Thomann

You may follow the seminar at the following link.

Please note that registration is mandatory to partecipate in this event. You can register here.

“Burden and inequality effects of bureaucracies’ coping with overload” 

SPEAKER: Eva Thomann (University of Konstanz) 

ABSTRACT: Regulatory demands are growing worldwide without matching administrative capacity, overburdening bureaucracies. To cope, bureaucracies prioritize easy, quick, and high-profile cases, and delay or dismantle services. But we know little about how this affects different groups of people. This article argues that coping under overload shifts burdens onto citizen-clients and (re)produces inequalities in citizen–state interactions, even in high-capacity bureaucracies. Drawing on research on bureaucratic coping, administrative burden, and the social construction of target populations, we theorize how coping creates uncertainty and extra work that citizens experience as greater burden. We further argue that some practices especially disadvantage clients whose cases are complex, time-consuming, and low-profile, and who are seen as less „deserving“. We test these arguments in high-capacity street-level organizations in Germany, triangulating surveys of public administrators in Baden-Württemberg (N=676, response rate 60 per cent) and Rhineland-Palatinate (N=211, response rate 85 per cent) with a representative survey of citizen-clients (N=1,400). Findings show that delaying services raises burdens for everyone, while deprioritization raises them most for citizen-clients with a migration background. These findings extend theories of administrative burden and bureaucratic coping to high-capacity settings, showing that coping has distributive effects: it raises burden for all, but especially for disadvantaged groups. This matters for citizen–state relations as administrative overload becomes a structural feature of governance.

BIO: Eva Thomann is Professor of Public Administration at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz. She is also a Principal Investigator in the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality.” She holds a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Zurich and a PhD in Public Administration from the University of Bern. She has held research and visiting positions at the Universities of Bern, Mannheim, Heidelberg and Exeter, and at the European University Institute in Florence. Her research focuses on policy implementation: how policies are put into practice, why, and with what consequences. Her internationally comparative work examines current challenges for public administration where it meets democracy and society. These include administrative inequality, public sector corruption, bureaucratic overload, and the politicization of frontline bureaucracies. Her other interests include Europeanization and European integration, street-level bureaucracy, multilevel and hybrid governance, public accountability, behavioral public administration, and case-oriented and set-theoretic methods. She wrote the award-winning monograph Customized Implementation of European Union Food Safety Policy: United in Diversity? (Palgrave, 2019). She has co-authored books with Cambridge University Press, Bristol University Press and Oxford University Press (forthcoming). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Policy & Society, Public Management Review, Policy Studies Journal, Sociological Methods & Research, Governance, Public Administration, the Journal of European Public Policy, the European Journal of Political Research and Policy Sciences, among others. Eva Thomann founded and convenes the Konstanz Methods Excellence Workshops (KOMEX) and teaches at international method schools. She sits on the advisory boards of Regulation & Governance, the Journal of European Public Policy, Policy Studies Journal and the European Journal of Political Research. She is also active in COMPASSS, the Methods Excellence Network (methodsnet) and the Netherlands Institute of Governance (NIG). She was editor of Regulation & Governance (2019–2024), Vice President for Western Europe of the International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM, 2019–2024), and an executive board member of the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA, 2019–2022). From 2015 to 2023 she co-chaired the EGPA Permanent Study Group XIII “Public Policies.”