by Meghan Doughty

April 27, 2020

Meghan Doughty, MPA Faculty Member, completed an article in April 2020, with her co-writer, Karen J Bahler entitled, “Hostages to Compliance: Towards a Reasonableness Test for Administrative Burdens”, © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Public Management Research Association. All rights reserved.

For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, gvaa010, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppmgov/gvaa010 Published: 18 April 2020

Abstract

Administrative burden on its most basic level refers to “an individual’s experience of policy implementation as onerous”. The concept of administrative burdens raises complex questions of both theory and practice for public administrators and scholars. Ambitious agendas have been laid out for investigating the origins, mechanisms, and impacts of administrative burdens, and for building practical knowledge about how to minimize administrative burdens without sacrificing program effectiveness and efficiency. Those same authors, and others, have advanced the concept theoretically as well. This article builds on those efforts to address a normative question at the concept’s core—namely, the question of what makes an administrative burden acceptable or excessive, reasonable or unreasonable. Our inquiry begins with the recognition that administrative burdens sometimes perform important functions and principles and methods are needed for determining when a specific type or degree of burden crosses the threshold from reasonableness to unreasonableness. Toward that end, we propose a five-part test, similar to those employed by the Supreme Court, for bureaucrats to use when assessing the justifications for bureaucratic procedures and requirements that involve administrative burden.