Does perspective-getting reduce bureaucrats’ preferential treatment of mobile EU workers? Experimental evidence from four European countries

Perspective-getting is a novel anti-discrimination intervention that encourages bureaucrats actively to consider applicants’ viewpoints when performing administrative processing tasks. We evaluate perspective-getting’s effectiveness to reduce bureaucrats’ preferential treatment of certain mobile EU workers which otherwise compromises equal access to social rights under the EU’s Social Europe principles. Using choice-based conjoint survey experiments, we assess the effects of perspective-getting for bureaucrats across four diverse administrative contexts: Denmark, Ireland, Spain, and Switzerland. The results of our Hierarchical Bayes analyses reveal that perspective-getting can decrease some of bureaucrats’ strongest biases in their tendency to preferentially treat individuals’ signalling efforts, for instance via fluent language skills, longer residency, or proven job integration efforts. In addition, the intervention can reduce many country-specific biases regarding clients’ ascriptive traits, such as gender, nationality and age. Overall, results across the four countries suggests that perspective-getting can be a potent tool for promoting more equitable bureaucratic decision-making. At the same time, the mixed strength of the evidence, and some rare cases of increased bias under the treatment, suggest that perspective-getting is most effective when bureaucrats fully engage with the task or when it is combined with other anti-discrimination measures.