The forthcoming article “The Unequal Distribution of Opportunity: A National Audit Study of Bureaucratic Discrimination in Primary School Access” by Asmus Leth Olsen, Jonas Høgh Kyhse‐Andersen and Donald Moynihan is summarized by the author(s) below.
We hope that public officials will treat us fairly, offering equal access to public services whatever our background. Whether bureaucrats meet such ideals in practice is another question. The discretion inherent in their jobs gives them the opportunity to discriminate across groups. We offer evidence that school officials in Denmark are likely to engage in such discrimination: they are less likely to offer positions in schools to families with a Muslim name less frequently than to their Danish peers.
To understand patterns of bureaucratic discrimination we distinguish between two approaches: allocative exclusion and administrative burdens. Allocative exclusion refers to bureaucrats systematically providing some resources to some groups more than others. We test if officials engage in discrimination via allocative exclusion by offering school places to families with a Muslim name less frequently than to their Danish peers. We therefore examine actual decisions to allocate public resources, not just responses to requests for information.
Second, bureaucrats can apply more indirect forms of discrimination, by imposing administrative burdens differentially across groups. Administrators might decline to share information with, be less welcoming toward, or demand more documentation from out-groups. The applicant might not receive a direct rejection, and still participate in the bureaucratic process, but under less favorable circumstances. We examine if bureaucrats impose greater compliance and psychological costs on Muslim families.
We undertook a national field experiment where putative Muslim and Danish families sent an email requesting to transfer their child to a local school (n=1,698). School transfers requests are common in a Danish context. We examine access to primary education because it matters profoundly for later-life outcomes and is central to cultivating the civic skills needed for citizenship. Muslims in Europe often play a double out-group role, differentiated in both religion and ethnicity from predominantly Christian or non-religious natives. Muslim immigrants perform poorly in Danish elementary schools, contributing to later life socio-economic disparities. Furthermore, the risk of anti-Muslim bias has been exacerbated by the refugee crisis, which has encouraged anti-immigrant politics across Europe.
The large differences in responses we find – 25% of those with Danish names were directly offered a spot at the school, compared to 15% of those with Muslim names – provides unambiguous evidence of discrimination via allocative exclusion. We also find that Danish bureaucrats discriminate in how they impose administrative burdens, seeking more information and offering a less welcoming tone to Muslims.
About the Author(s): Asmus Leth Olsen is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of Copenhagen, Jonas Høgh Kyhse-Andersen is an independent researcher, and Donald P. Moynihan is a Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Their research “The Unequal Distribution of Opportunity: A National Audit Study of Bureaucratic Discrimination in Primary School Access” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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