The Foundational Text

Seeing Burden as a Political and Policy Choice

This is the second post in a series examining the real costs of navigating the state in Aotearoa. Last month, I introduced the administrative burden framework developed over the past decade by American scholars Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan, and asked whether the Ministry for Regulation’s focus on “cutting compliance costs” is the right frame for problem of compliance costs. This week, we go back to the foundational text: the 2015 article by Moynihan, Herd, and Hope Harvey that started the field. I sit with its most unsettling argument: that the friction citizens experience when dealing with the state is not always an accident. Sometimes, it is a choice.

In this post, I want to do three things. First, unpack the three-part typology at the heart of the 2015 article: learning costs, compliance costs, and psychological costs. In doing so I want to show why distinguishing between them matters. Second, I want sit with the article’s most challenging argument: that administrative burden is not always a design failure, but can function as a deliberate political strategy and policy choice. And third, propose a fourth cost that the framework does not name, one I am hearing about constantly from clients in Aotearoa right now: the burden of impermanence, of a state that keeps forgetting who you are because it keeps restructuring itself.

Three Costs, Carefully Distinguished

Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey argue that when citizens interact with the state, they bear three distinct types of cost, and that failing to see all three produces incomplete analysis and, ultimately, bad policy.

The first is learning costs. Before any compliance can occur, a citizen must establish that a service or obligation even exists, whether they are eligible, and what the rules of engagement require.

The state may offer a benefit in good faith, but if the eligibility criteria are so complex that working out whether you qualify requires hours of research, or money for professional advice, then the benefit is, for a significant portion of its intended population, practically inaccessible.

In Aotearoa, one might think of the supplementary benefits available through Work and Income. The information is technically public. But for a person in crisis, without reliable internet access, or the energy to navigate the website, the effort of working out which of the dozens of available benefits applies represents a cost that never appears in any impact assessment.

The second category, compliance costs, captures what we more traditionally call “red tape”: the form-filling, the document-gathering, the transport to a government office, the half-day of unpaid leave to attend an appointment. These costs are regressive in their structure. A fifty-dollar fee for a certified document is an inconvenience for a professional household with savings and flexible employment. For a family living from one pay to the next, it can be an insurmountable barrier. The cost functions as a gatekeeper, quietly determining who gets access and who does not.

The third category is where the framework becomes genuinely illuminating. Psychological costs are the stress, the frustration, the stigma, and the erosion of dignity that accompany these processes. The anxiety that a single error might have serious consequences. The experience of being asked, repeatedly, to prove that one is deserving. The feeling of a system that treats you as a number, or that seems, in its very design, to be inviting you to give up. This is not merely unpleasant. Psychological costs deter eligible people from applying for help to which they are entitled, and they erode trust in government over the long run.

What the three-part typology reveals is that a process might have relatively low compliance costs, for example, a short online form, while simultaneously creating formidable barriers through high learning costs and significant psychological burden. Burden is not a single thing. It is multi-dimensional, and each dimension has its own logic.

Burden as Strategy

The second major contribution of the article is its argument that burden is not merely a technical accident, but can function as a deliberate political and policy tool.

Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey illustrate this with Medicaid policy across three governorships in Wisconsin. What makes the case striking is not a simple partisan back-and-forth. Both Tommy Thompson, a Republican, and Jim Doyle, a Democrat, reduced administrative burdens and expanded access to the programme. When Scott Walker took office, that changed, not because the eligibility rules changed, but because the administrative environment around them did. Walker’s Commission on Waste, Fraud and Abuse systematically reframed the burden-reduction work of his predecessors as a threat to programme integrity, and set about reversing it. The changes were not random. They were deliberate, and they were effective.

Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey called the changes “hidden politics.” A legislative proposal to cut a benefit would be visible, contested, and politically costly. A quiet administrative decision to add a form, require an additional document, or close a local office can achieve substantially the same result with far less scrutiny. As such the burden becomes the policy, because access has been made difficult.

A Fourth Cost? The Burden of Impermanence

The framework was developed in the United States context, and it captures something real. But sitting with it over recent months, and listening to local corporate clients, I find myself wondering whether there is a fourth cost it does not fully name: one that particularly acute right now.

Call it the burden of impermanence. Or the cost of restructures to citizens.

The case manager who understood your situation is no longer in that role. The account manager who spent eighteen months learning the technical architecture of your regulatory environment has taken a redundancy. The policy analyst who had genuinely absorbed the science underpinning your consenting framework has moved to another sector, taking with her two years of accumulated context that was never written down anywhere. And you, the citizen, the small business business, the regulated party, must now begin again. You must re-establish the shared understanding that made the relationship functional. You must re-educate the state about itself, and its role.

This is not quite a learning cost in Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey’s sense, because the knowledge already existed. It was simply attached to a person, and that person has gone. It is not a compliance cost, because no new rule has been introduced. And it is not straightforwardly a psychological cost, though the exhaustion and quiet despair it produces are real enough. It is the cost of the state’s own institutional amnesia, transferred wholesale onto the person who had the misfortune of investing in a working relationship with it.

The scale of restructuring across the public service over the past few decades has been substantial. When an organisation loses experienced staff in large numbers over a short period, it does not simply lose capacity. It loses the informal knowledge that never made it into a briefing note: specifically, the nuanced understanding of how a sector operates, the accumulated professional trust that reduces friction on both sides of the counter. That loss is borne, in the first instance, by remaining staff. And it is borne, repeatedly and invisibly, by the people and organisations who had built their engagement strategies around relationships and knowledge that no longer exist.

The Herd and Moynihan framework asks us to see burden as a political choice. This fourth dimension asks us to see institutional continuity as a public good: one with a real cost when it is depleted, even if that cost never appears in a redundancy calculation. It is something that I will return to later in this series.

What It All Means for Us

The Ministry for Regulation’s focus on “compliance costs” is not wrong. It is incomplete. If we only measure the time it takes to fill in a form, we miss the time it took to find the form, we miss entirely the psychological toll of the process and we miss how long it takes for the form to make a difference because the account manager has taken redundancy. The Treasury framework, from which so much of our regulatory impact analysis still draws, has the same blind spot. It makes the costs to agencies visible. It is not designed to make the costs to citizens visible.

And if we do not see burden as a political variable and a policy choice, we risk being naïve about what is actually happening when a process becomes more difficult. Is it really just poor design? Or is someone, somewhere, making a quiet choice about who should have easy access and who should not?

The 2015 article by Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey gives us the tools to ask those questions: to look at a government process and ask not just “how much does it cost the agency to run?” but “who bears the learning, compliance, and psychological costs, and is that equitable?” And, most importantly: is the level of burden we see the result of neglect, or the result of a choice?

These are not comfortable questions. But they are the right ones.

Next month: We turn to the evidence on distribution. Administrative burdens are not experienced equally. The research is unequivocal about where they fall hardest: and why.

References

Moynihan, D., Herd, P., & Harvey, H. (2015). Administrative burden: Learning, psychological, and compliance costs in citizen-state interactions. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 25(1), 43–69. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muu009