Administrative burden as a constraint on freedom in the modern welfare state

The administrative burden literature has demonstrated a variety of ways in which administrative burdens can act as barriers to citizens accessing services to which they are entitled. This paper connects these insights to ideas from the Capabilities Approach to Human Development to articulate the ways that administrative burdens can be understood as constraints on freedom. Drawing from examples in the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme application process, we discuss potential barriers to accessing social support services in the conditional welfare state. This analysis demonstrates the subtle mechanisms through which citizens can be excluded from accessing services to which they are entitled and the disconnection between being entitled to a service in principle and being free to access that service in practice. The paper demonstrates that by paying more attention to the filtering mechanisms in social policies, administrative burden can offer insight into what constrains freedom in the modern welfare state.

Points for practitioners

• For many policy areas within the welfare state, there are a variety of challenges that can prevent citizens from obtaining access to rights which they are entitled to receive, with administrative burdens being a common type of barrier to completing administrative processes that relate to accessing rights.
• Administrative burdens can act as constraints on freedom for people by preventing them from completing administrative processes which are necessary to complete in order to access supports to which they are entitled, and which would otherwise expand their freedom by increasing the range of meaningful choices which they would hold.
• Practitioners should think about structural components of the wider system they engage with when working on or changing an application process (like the health system), since those components of the system may become overloaded when they become a requirement for a widely applied for service, and this can make those requirements harder for applicants to comply with.