IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/amposc/v61y2017i1p100-116.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does Race Affect Access to Government Services? An Experiment Exploring Street‐Level Bureaucrats and Access to Public Housing

Author

Listed:
  • Katherine Levine Einstein
  • David M. Glick

Abstract

While experimental studies of local election officials have found evidence of racial discrimination, we know little about whether these biases manifest in bureaucracies that provide access to valuable government programs and are less tied to politics. We address these issues in the context of affordable housing programs using a randomized field experiment. We explore responsiveness to putative white, black, and Hispanic requests for aid in the housing application process. In contrast to prior findings, public housing officials respond at equal rates to black and white email requests. We do, however, find limited evidence of responsiveness discrimination toward Hispanics. Moreover, we observe substantial differences in email tone. Hispanic housing applicants were 20 percentage points less likely to be greeted by name than were their black and white counterparts. This disparity in tone is somewhat more muted in more diverse locations, but it does not depend on whether a housing official is Hispanic.

Suggested Citation

  • Katherine Levine Einstein & David M. Glick, 2017. "Does Race Affect Access to Government Services? An Experiment Exploring Street‐Level Bureaucrats and Access to Public Housing," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 61(1), pages 100-116, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:61:y:2017:i:1:p:100-116
    DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12252
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12252
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/ajps.12252?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kenneth Lowande & Andrew Proctor, 2020. "Bureaucratic Responsiveness to LGBT Americans," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 64(3), pages 664-681, July.
    2. Nicholas Carnes & John Holbein, 2019. "Do public officials exhibit social class biases when they handle casework? Evidence from multiple correspondence experiments," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(3), pages 1-9, March.
    3. Nicholas R. Jenkins & Michelangelo Landgrave & Gabriel E. Martinez, 2020. "Do political donors have greater access to government officials? Evidence from a FOIA field experiment with US municipalities," Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, vol. 3(2).
    4. Žuffová, Mária, 2024. "Applying Text-as-data Methods to Information Requests: A Novel Approach to Study Different Political Phenomena," OSF Preprints 8p5e6, Center for Open Science.
    5. Mikula, Stepan & Montag, Josef, 2023. "Roma and Bureaucrats: A Field Experiment on Ethnic and Socioeconomic Discrimination," IZA Discussion Papers 16218, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. Druckman, James N. & Levy, Jeremy & Sands, Natalie, 2021. "Bias in education disability accommodations," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    7. Malte Dahl, 2022. "Alike but Different: How Cultural Distinctiveness Shapes Immigrant-Origin Minorities’ Access to the Labour Market," Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, vol. 23(4), pages 2269-2287, December.
    8. Wibbenmeyer, Matthew & Anderson, Sarah & Plantinga, Andrew J., 2020. "Inequality in Agency Responsiveness: Evidence from Salient Wildfire Events," RFF Working Paper Series 20-22, Resources for the Future.
    9. Kolstad, Karoline Larsen, 2023. "Overburdened Bureaucrats: Providing Equal Access to Public Services during COVID-19," OSF Preprints zmt5y, Center for Open Science.
    10. Gundacker, Lidwina & Kosyakova, Yuliya & Schneider, Gerald, 2021. "Global norms, regional practices: Taste-based and statistical discrimination in German asylum decision-making," Working Papers 05, University of Konstanz, Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality. Perceptions, Participation and Policies".
    11. Pfaff, Steven & Crabtree, Charles & Kern, Holger L. & Holbein, John B., 2018. "Does religious bias shape access to public services? A large-scale audit experiment among street-level bureaucrats," SocArXiv 9khds, Center for Open Science.
    12. Donavon Johnson & Alexander Kroll, 2021. "What makes us tolerant of administrative burden? Race, representation, and identity," Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, vol. 4(1).
    13. Wittels, Annabelle Sophie, 2020. "The effect of politician-constituent conflict on bureaucratic responsiveness under varying information frames," SocArXiv 4x8q2, Center for Open Science.
    14. Štěpán Mikula & Josef Montag, 2022. "Roma and Bureaucrats: A Field Experiment in the Czech Republic," MUNI ECON Working Papers 2022-01, Masaryk University, revised Feb 2023.
    15. Adman, Per & Larsson Taghizadeh, Jonas, 2020. "Public officials’ treatment of minority clients," Working Paper Series 2020:12, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:61:y:2017:i:1:p:100-116. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5907 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.