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theses

Governments today face the unenviable challenge of expanding the social safety net in ways that strengthen the social contract between the citizen and the state without undermining individual autonomy and the overall experience of democratic citizenship. All too often, the legitimate politico-administrative values that are advanced as regulatory justifications, obscure the costs imposed by the specific choices of policy instruments and implementation on policy targets. In the context of a welfare program with increasing service outputs, this research explored how the costs of onerous experiences in administrative encounters restructure the citizenship outcomes, i.e., the civic capacities and social dispositions of the policy targets.

The overarching objective of this research is to understand how administrative burden shapes citizenship outcomes. In the context of the cooking gas cash transfers reform in India, this dissertation used mixed methods research to explore the originators of administrative burden, its differential impacts on policy targets, and its role in shaping policy feedbacks. The qualitative research findings identify a broad range of costs associated with administrative burden, and how they are disproportionately experienced by the disadvantaged groups among the policy targets.

The field survey findings showed that low education, female gender, and rural status are predictors of administrative burden. They also found that administrative burden has a negative predictive effect on civil participation, and a positive predictive effect on political participation, activism as well as citizen disengagement. These findings are in consonance with actual citizen participatory behaviors of the case context, wherein civil society led public interest litigation has developed as a response to technocratic implementation. Importantly, the findings also show that even when there is an increase in the policy targets’ perceptions of procedural justice and policy legitimacy, administrative burden is found to be a negative predictor of positive citizenship outcomes and vice versa. The results from the embedded field survey experiment find evidence that the strategic frames that use the fiscal and inequality frames are both very effective in enhancing policy legitimacy. The findings reflect the need for foregrounding administrative burden reduction as a public value integral to effective policy implementation in democratic societies.

ETD_9513

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Srinivas Yerramsetti

doi:10.7282/t3-bqpf-mt02

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.