“A bridge over troubled water?”: conceptualizing third parties’ involvement in administrative burden

While the mediating role of third-party actors in shaping administrative burdens has gained growing recognition, their theoretical conceptualization remains underdeveloped. Through a two-stage deductive-inductive process combining conceptual synthesis from the administrative burden literature with an illustrative case study of the Israeli disability benefits system, this article proposes a multidimensional analytical framework for understanding third-party actors in administrative burden contexts. The article identifies three core dimensions characterizing third-party actors: their functional role (agents, service providers, verifiers, and reformers); their level of formality (formal, semi-formal, and informal); and their institutional position (state, non-state, and hybrid). Together, these dimensions provide a systematic understanding of the varied mechanisms through which third parties shape burdensome citizens’ encounters, extending administrative burden beyond the citizen-state dyad and widening the definition of who counts as a third party.