My first article is out in the International Public Management Journal!
Here’s what it’s about: When facing a disobedient client, caseworkers are often required to impose sanctions. But even when sanctions are explicitly required by law, research shows that caseworkers may turn a blind eye. Why so?
The study asks how certain clients can merit themselves to avoid sanctioning.
Drawing from existing literature, I propose that clients can avoid sanctions if they seem (1) needy, (2) hard working, or (3) resourceful.
To test these expectations, I ran a conjoint vignette experiment among Danish unemployment caseworkers. In the experiment, I presented each of 407 caseworkers with 3 fictive client descriptions and asked if the caseworker would sanction that client. Within each client description, I randomly assigned several pieces of information concerning the three types of deserving clients above.
Importantly, according to policy rules, all clients should have been sanctioned, yet for many of the client profiles caseworkers were unwilling to impose sanctions.
Interestingly, caseworkers tended to favor stronger clients when bending the rules: Clients who appeared motivated, had not been sanctioned in the past, or had years of previous job experience were all less likely to be sanctioned.
This is a bit of paradox: Although welfare usually targets clients in need, avoiding welfare sanctions seems based on client resources. Consequently, caseworker rule-bending can have unintended distributional consequences since stronger clients are those who can get away with disobedience.
Here is key figure from the paper:
You can download a preprint of the article here.