Faculty Research Director

Dan Nielson

Project Team Leads

Danny Cowser

Discrimination towards citizens based on ethnicity and socioeconomic inequality have been analyzed extensively at the level of elected politicians, but much less at the level of bureaucrats, whose mission requires prima facie impartiality towards citizens. In this Government Responsiveness project, we examine whether government agencies discriminate (according to gender, race or ethnicity, immigration status, partisanship, religion, and/or socioeconomic status) in communication with their constituencies by conducting an array of correspondence-audit field experiments in which actual citizens contact bureaucrats to request information on public services in five countries (the U.S, South Korea, South Africa, Turkey, and Argentina). Benefitting from the variation within confederates in terms of their gender, race or ethnicity, immigration, political, religious, and socioeconomic background, we match them on covariates and statistically maximize differences on the key dimensions between individuals in pairs. Afterwards, we will randomly assign individuals from the pairs as treatments to government agencies. Our main outcome variable is responsiveness, particularly whether the agency responds, how helpful the response is, and how much time elapses for the response to be received. To analyze the data on how long it takes our confederates to get a response, we use survival analysis techniques (also known as time-to-event analysis). We anticipate that women, racial or ethnic minorities, immigrants, political affiliates, religious minorities, and economically disadvantaged individuals will be subject to more discrimination, manifested by a decreased likelihood in response, poorer quality responses, and increased length of response time.

In the 2022-23 academic year, our team recruited 1,000 residents as confederates to our study who wrote emails for their local public officials. We standardized each email, used statistical matching techniques to find like pairs of confederates, attached treatment assignments to each email, found the appropriate public servant to email for each resident’s request, attached the email of the public official to the confederate, created emails for each confederate, and will soon launch the pilot of our experiment. The AY2023-24 will continue this exciting work.