Race And Racial Perceptions Shape Burden Tolerance For Medicaid And The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Safety-net programs do not reach all eligible Americans, partly because of administrative burden, or experiencing bureaucratic obstacles in obtaining and maintaining program benefits. This burden often disproportionately affects historically marginalized groups, adding concerns about equity. We used a national survey to examine public thinking about the acceptability of administrative burdens imposed by states when implementing Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the role of race in these considerations. We found that support for state actions associated with six types of burden was unchanged when respondents were informed about disparate effects by race. Neither racial identity nor prejudice toward other racial groups was associated with support for policies imposing higher burdens. However, non-Hispanic White respondents with higher levels of racial resentment were more supportive of policies that would create burden, whereas respondents who believed that burdens had disparate effects on historically disadvantaged groups favored less burdensome alternatives. Also associated with lower support for more burdensome policies were responses indicative of respondents' empathy, concerns about ability to manage burdens, Democratic party identification, and program experience.

How difficult should it be? Evidence of burden tolerance from a nationally representative sample.

There is growing attention to how policymakers and bureaucrats think about administrative burdens, but we know less about public tolerance for burdens. We examine public burden tolerance in two major programmes (Medicaid and SNAP) using a representative sample of US residents. We show broad support for work requirements and weaker support for generally making it difficult to access benefits. People with conservative beliefs, greater opposition to social policies, and higher income are more tolerant of burdens in social policies. Those who have personal experience of welfare policies are less tolerant of burdens.

Most Americans support minimizing administrative burdens for Medicaid recipients as the public health emergency ends.

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) public health emergency (PHE), states were barred from disenrolling anyone from Medicaid unless the beneficiary asked to be disenrolled, moved out of state, or died. Coverage increased, but as the PHE ends an estimated 7 million eligible Americans are expected to lose insurance due to difficulty navigating the renewal process. The end of the PHE therefore offers state policymakers a chance to reassess the value of such administrative burdens as a variety of policy tools are available to mitigate these losses. We inform this discussion via a national survey that captures public preferences around administrative burdens in public health insurance. We find strong public support for burden-reduction techniques that minimize coverage losses such as using administrative data to shift burdens onto the state and better outreach and communication, with an average of 74% of respondents supporting each policy tool. This support holds across the ideological spectrum and demographic groups, but it is stronger among liberals than conservatives, for those with more direct experience of burdens, those who struggle with such burdens, and for those with lower racial prejudice.

When blame avoidance backfires: Responses to performance framing and outgroup scapegoating during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Public officials use blame avoidance strategies when communicating performance information. While such strategies typically involve shifting blame to political opponents or other governments, we examine how they might direct blame to ethnic groups. We focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, where the Trump administration sought to shift blame by scapegoating (using the term "Chinese virus") and mitigate blame by positively framing performance information on COVID-19 testing. Using a novel experimental design that leverages machine learning techniques, we find scapegoating outgroups backfired, leading to greater blame of political leadership for the poor administrative response, especially among conservatives. Backlash was strongest for negatively framed performance data, demonstrating that performance framing shapes blame avoidance outcomes. We discuss how divisive blame avoidance strategies may alienate even supporters.

Rising to Ostrom's challenge: an invitation to walk on the bright side of public governance and public service.

In this programmatic essay, we argue that public governance scholarship would benefit from developing a self-conscious and cohesive strand of "positive" scholarship, akin to social science subfields like positive psychology, positive organizational studies, and positive evaluation. We call for a program of research devoted to uncovering the factors and mechanisms that enable high performing public policies and public service delivery mechanisms; procedurally and distributively fair processes of tackling societal conflicts; and robust and resilient ways of coping with threats and risks. The core question driving positive public administration scholarship should be: Why is it that particular public policies, programs, organizations, networks, or partnerships manage do much better than others to produce widely valued societal outcomes, and how might knowledge of this be used to advance institutional learning from positives?

Human Capital and Administrative Burden: The Role of Cognitive Resources in Citizen-State Interactions.

One means by which the state reinforces inequality is by imposing administrative burdens that loom larger for citizens with lower levels of human capital. Integrating insights from various disciplines, this article focuses on one aspect of human capital: cognitive resources. The authors outline a model that explains how burdens and cognitive resources, especially executive functioning, interrelate. The article then presents illustrative examples, highlighting three common life factors-scarcity, health problems, and age-related cognitive decline. These factors create a human capital catch-22, increasing people's likelihood of needing state assistance while simultaneously undermining the cognitive resources required to negotiate the burdens they encounter while seeking such assistance. The result is to reduce access to state benefits and increase inequality. The article concludes by calling for scholars of behavioral public administration and public administration more generally to incorporate more attention to human capital into their research.

How Different Forms of Health Matter to Political Participation.

Physical and mental health is known to have wide influence over most aspects of social life-be it schooling and employment or marriage and broader social engagement-but has received limited attention in explaining different forms of political participation. We analyze a unique dataset with a rich array of objective measures of cognitive and physical well-being and two objective measures of political participation, voting and contributing money to campaigns and parties. For voting, each aspect of health has a powerful effect on par with traditional predictors of participation such as education. In contrast, health has little to no effect on making campaign contributions. We recommend additional attention to the multifaceted affects of health on different forms of political participation.

Your Face is Your Fortune: Does Adolescent Attractiveness Predict Intimate Relationships Later in Life?

OBJECTIVE: A growing literature documents the importance of physical attractiveness in young and middle adulthood for romantic, marital, and sexual relationships, but little is known about how attractiveness in adolescence matters to intimate relationships in later life. We ask: does attractiveness early in life convey ongoing benefits late in life, or do such benefits erode over time? METHODS: We use multivariate regression models and more than 50 years of data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine the connections between adolescent physical attractiveness and intimate relationships (i.e., sexual activity and access to potential sexual partners) in later life. RESULTS: We find that adolescent attractiveness facilitates sexual activity in later life. This relationship is largely driven by attractiveness increasing the probability of having access to potential sexual partners. However, attractiveness is not related to sexual activity among married couples, even after controlling for marital duration. Men, those in good health, and wealthier individuals are also more likely to engage in several facets of intimate relationships. DISCUSSION: These findings highlight the importance of relationship context for later life sexual activity and begin to explicate the pathways through which factors across the life course-particularly attractiveness-influence sexual activity in later life.

A Life Worth Living: Evidence on the Relationship Between Prosocial Values and Happiness.

Employees with a desire to help others provide benefits to their organization, clients, and fellow workers, but what do they get in return? We argue that the prosocial desire to help others is a basic human goal that matters to an individual's happiness. We employ both longitudinal and cross-sectional data to demonstrate that work-related prosocial motivation is associated with higher subjective well-being, both in terms of current happiness and life satisfaction later in life. Cross-sectional data also suggest that perceived social impact (the belief that one's job is making a difference) is even more important for happiness than the prosocial desire to help. The results show that the relationship between prosocial motivation and happiness is not limited to government employees, suggesting that in this aspect of altruistic behavior, public and private employees are not so different.