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Or take a look at the face of Vladimir Putin, who has, alas, the power of life and death over millions of people and is the owner of the most expensive toilet-paper dispenser in the world. For reasons of survival, one hemisphere of the brain, the left, has evolved over millions of years to favor manipulation-grabbing, getting, and controlling-while the other, the right, has been tasked with understanding the whole picture. By contrast, the right hemisphere sees not the representation but the living presence. AI, like the left hemisphere, has no sense of the bigger picture, of other values, or of the way in which context-or even scale and extent-changes everything.

Abstract Administrative burdens in citizen-state interactions are increasingly gaining attention in both research and practice. However, being a relatively young research field, there is still considerable disagreement about how to conceptualize and measure administrative burdens. In particular, burdens are sometimes equated with what the state does, and other times with what target group members experience. We argue that such disagreement is a barrier for further theoretical development and has removed focus from studying the process in which state actions are converted into individual outcomes. We provide advice on how to conceptually bridge the gap between different conceptualizations of administrative burden and lay out a research agenda covering the next important theoretical and empirical steps based on such a shared understanding. We propose that developing the conceptual and empirical foundation of administrative burden research will help asking new and important research questions and building cumulative knowledge. To illustrate these points, we present a series of new research questions for future research to engage with.

Abstract The notion of a representative bureaucracy has generated a great deal of research although many issues are yet to be resolved and some have not been addressed. This theoretical essay uses a contingency theory approach to address a set of key questions relevant to representative bureaucracy. It discusses who is represented and what values get represented at the aggregate level, why bureaucrats represent, who they represent, and which bureaucrats represent at the individual level, and the empirical issues of critical mass, intersectionality, and how representation might change as a minority becomes a majority. The essay proposes 15 testable hypotheses and four modeling recommendations for empirical analysis.

Bureaucracies are configured differently to private sector and political organizations. Across a wide range of civil services entry is competitive, promotion is constrained by seniority, jobs are for life, and retirement occurs at a fixed age. This implies that older entering officers, who are less likely to attain the glittering prize of reaching the top of the bureaucracy before they retire, may be less motivated to exert effort. Using a nationwide stakeholder survey and rich administrative data on elite civil servants in India, we provide evidence that: (i) officers who cannot reach the senior-most positions before they retire are perceived to be less effective and are more likely to be suspended and (ii) this effect is weakened by a reform that extends the retirement age. Together, these results suggest that the career incentive of reaching the top of a public organization is a powerful determinant of bureaucrat performance.