Personality as a Mechanism of Inequality in Experiences of Administrative Burdens

Aske Halling
Additional contact information
Aske Halling: Aarhus University

No 7wvh4_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Administrative burdens—the learning, compliance, and psychological costs citizens experience when interacting with the state—vary substantially across individuals. Existing research shows that burdens are unequally distributed and shaped by individuals’ social background, their administrative skills, and resource-related pressures such as health problems and financial scarcity. However, we know much less about the psychological foundations of inequality in burdensome experiences. This article examines whether stable personality traits help explain variation in experiences of administrative burden. It argues that two traits in particular—conscientiousness and emotional stability—play a central role in how citizens navigate administrative requirements, given their established links to information processing, task management, and stress regulation. The argument is tested using two pre-registered survey studies from Denmark: a cross sectional survey on tax reporting (n = 1,747) and a vignette experiment involving a fictional elderly care application (n = 1,769). Across both studies, higher levels of conscientiousness and emotional stability are consistently associated with lower learning, compliance, and psychological costs, whereas other personality traits show weaker and less consistent relationships. Additional analyses show that these two traits match or exceed the explanatory power of established predictors such as education, health, and financial scarcity, and account for a non-trivial share of the variation commonly attributed to them. The findings position personality—and particularly conscientiousness and emotional stability—as a central, yet previously overlooked, source of inequality in citizens’ experiences of administrative burden.

Date: 2026-03-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/69ba8f37816c5971383aa397/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:7wvh4_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/7wvh4_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().