The Logic of Administrative Burden: Why Digital Government Reform Fails to Reduce Administrative Burden

Administrative burden affects government performance and credibility. It is widely believed that digital government may reduce administrative burden. However, since the patterns and sources of administrative burden have not been fully illustrated, the theoretical logic underlying digital government and administrative burden is still unclear. Based on contract theory, we view administrative burden as the costs imposed by the frictions among conflicting behavioral norms in the government-citizen interactions. From the perspective of those bearing the administrative burden, the most desirable norms are not followed, so the experience of policy implementation becomes onerous to them. This definition combines the existing interpretations of administrative burden as “friction”, “imposition”, and “onerous experiences”. The conflicting norms relate to the incomplete contract within government organizations, including the formal part consisting of organization rules and informal part consisting of shadow contracts, and different implicit contracts in government-citizen interactions, including the ones that call for respects for public interest and effective public services, and the ones that allow street-level bureaucrats to muddle through, sometimes by imposing costs on the citizens. Taking the digital government reform process in district A as example, we show that digital government reform leads to administrative burden in newer forms by 3 different ways. Each norm available in the government-citizen interactions between the tax office and industries in district A could be viewed as a salient focal point in the coordination games of tax business. Digital government reform could impose burden by setting a new game to play, decreasing the payoffs in the equilibrium of the game, or even motivating a deviation to non-equilibrium outcomes. Various apps and tools applied in the reform lead to larger learning costs to the taxpayers. However, when the taxpayers turn to the tax office for help, the bureaucrats refuse to follow the implicit norms that call for public services. This also leads to that the taxpayers refuse to follow the norms that cooperate the muddling through practice for the tax office, shifting administrative burdens backwards to the bureaucrats. The digital government reform also brings strict regulations in the bureaucrat system, while the tax officers make use of their hidden information to negate the effect of digitalized regulations. In short, the digital government reform brings new interactive tools, changes the rules of interactions in policy implementation, and also leads to conflicts among these rules and norms underlying the complicated and incomplete nature of government-citizen interactions. The costs imposed by these kinds of conflicts could feel onerous, thus could be viewed as newer administrative burden.