P24 New Light on Old Burdens: Rethinking Administrative Burden in Public Management

Panel Chairs

Corresponding chair

• Paige Moore, Meredith College. plmoore@meredith.edu

Review group chair

• Ratna Dougherty, University of South Florida. rbdougherty@usf.edu

Co-Chair

• Jack Register, Yeshiva University. 

Panel Topic Description

Administrative burden has become one of public management's most generative concepts for understanding how wicked problems are experienced on the ground, not as abstractions but as forms, waiting rooms, and eligibility rules. This panel invites papers that advance administrative burden scholarship broadly, in any domain, with particular interest in how burden operates in high-stakes, safety-critical, or crisis-adjacent contexts.

Burden rarely announces itself as burden. It is embedded in eligibility criteria, self-report requirements, complaint procedures, documentation demands, and the discretion of frontline workers, and it often falls hardest on those least equipped to absorb it. This panel asks how burden operates when the state is charged with determining need, adjudicating harm, or allocating protection under conditions of risk and uncertainty:

• What happens when self-report becomes the only available measure of need?
• When complaint or accountability processes quietly filter out those least able to navigate them?, or,
• When eligibility systems demand the most from people with the least capacity to comply?

The panel welcomes contributions on administrative burden across any policy area, from health and social services to immigration, benefits administration, environmental regulation, education, public safety, and disaster response. We are especially drawn to work that pushes the field forward rather than simply applying it: burden measured through novel data and methods, burden explained through new theoretical lenses, and familiar, long-studied burdens reexamined in a light that reveals what earlier work may have missed.

We are especially interested in how burden shapes who is protected, who is heard, and who is excluded when public organizations govern risk and crisis, how self-report and discretion function as governance tools in their own right, and how administrative design might reduce unnecessary burden without abandoning legitimate gatekeeping functions. Theoretical, empirical, and practice-oriented contributions are all welcome, as are interdisciplinary perspectives.

Relevance to the Conference Theme

Administrative burden theory speaks directly to the IRSPM 2027 theme's concern with how public administrations protect citizens while sustaining trust and legitimacy under conditions of uncertainty. This matters because burden is often the mechanism through which safety and security mandates translate into lived experience, determining who accesses protection and who is filtered out of government processes altogether.

Administrative burden is a cross-cutting concept relevant to nearly every domain of public management, and the conference theme's concern with safety, security, and democratic accountability offers a timely occasion to bring burden scholars into conversation across policy areas, particularly where the state's protective mandates intersect with risk, crisis, and uncertainty. The panel contributes to public management scholarship on how institutional design choices distribute burden unevenly, how measurement tools such as self-report and eligibility criteria can themselves become sites of exclusion, and how public organizations might build capacity to govern risk and crisis without narrowing access, participation, or trust.

The panel is especially positioned to advance the field by surfacing new measures of burden, new theoretical accounts of how it operates, and fresh readings of long-studied burdens that reveal what earlier frameworks may have missed. This aligns closely with the conference's broader call to examine institutional resilience and legitimacy amid overlapping and complex challenges.