Administrative Burden and the Access–Fraud Trade-Off

Abstract

Administrative burden represents political choices embedded in policy design that affect how people perceive and experience government. While policymakers frequently invoke fraud prevention to justify imposing burdens in welfare programs, this rhetoric embodies an unacknowledged normative judgment about the relative costs of fraud and abuse versus program exclusion for eligible beneficiaries. This study quantifies this access–fraud trade-off in means-tested social welfare programs through a contingent valuation experiment (N = 2250). We find that respondents were willing to accept approximately 192 ineligible recipients receiving benefits in exchange for 1000 eligible beneficiaries not being excluded due to administrative burdens. While we find no direct evidence that psychological distance (i.e., randomized exposure to “welfare” vs. specific programs) affects this trade-off across the full sample, political affiliation is a significant moderator in our exploratory analysis. Unlike Democrats/Independents, Republicans demonstrate substantially lower tolerance for potential fraud when evaluating abstract “welfare” compared to specific programs like unemployment insurance. Experience with means-tested welfare programs, which reduces psychological distance, has a similar moderating effect. These findings extend construal level theory to administrative burden preferences and contribute to the policy implementation literature by quantifying the access–fraud trade-off—a metric largely absent from academic and policy discussions despite its importance for program legitimacy.