A Replication of “Why Do Policymakers Support Administrative Burdens? The Roles of Deservingness, Political Ideology, and Personal Experience”

This article replicates a survey experiment by Baekgaard, Moynihan, and Thomsen (2021), analyzing individual-level differences as to why administrative burdens are constructed and imposed on individuals by policymakers. Administrative burdens are known to be consequential and distributive. So why do policymakers support them? Recent empirical studies provide us with motivations behind supporting or imposing administrative burdens, but few studies investigate whether these motivations translate across cultural and organizational settings. We opt for an as-direct-as-possible replication in the Flemish setting, a case most likely to replicate results. In line with the original study, political ideology and personal beliefs about deservingness impact local politicians' burden tolerance. However, our effect sizes are much smaller. Other results fail to replicate in the Flemish setting. We explore the role of organizational size and elaborate on how comparative replication studies can help to shed light on the effect of context in public administration.
© 2025 The Author(s).