Red Tape and Democracy: How Rules Affect Citizenship Rights

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, political science has paid increasing attention to the feedback effects of policy—the idea that the design of policies has profound effects on how citizens experience government and understand their role in the polity. One concept that is perfectly placed to explain how citizens experience administrative rules is red tape. But even as an impressive empirical scholarship on red tape has grown in recent years, it has focused almost exclusively on organizational actors rather than citizens. This article ties the red tape concept into a policy feedback framework. The authors argue that administrative rules frequently exert significant and unjustified compliance burden that restrict access to political and social rights. Furthermore, such burdens have equity implications, because they are often disproportionately experienced by disadvantaged groups. These propositions are illustrated using examples from welfare state and election policies in the United States.