https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1755-5243
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ABSTRACT
EU citizens have rights when living in a member state other than their own. Bureaucratic discrimination undermines the operation of these rights. We go beyond extant research on bureaucratic discrimination in two ways. First, we move beyond considering mobile EU citizens as homogenous immigrant minority to assess whether EU citizens from certain countries face greater discrimination than others. Second, we analyse whether discrimination patterns vary between the general population and public administrators regarding attributes triggering discrimination and whether accountability prevents discrimination. In a pre-registered design, we conduct a population-based conjoint experiment in Germany including a sub-sample of public administrators. We find that (1) Dutch and fluent German speakers are preferred, i.e., positively discriminated, over Romanians and EU citizens with broken language skills, that (2) our way of holding people accountable was ineffective, and that (3) in all these regards discriminatory behaviour of public administrators is similar to behaviour of the general population.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Center of Competence in Research NCCR – on the move funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant number 51NF40-182897). We also thank two very constructive reviewers for their very helpful and constructive comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 See https://data.oecd.org/migration/permanent-immigrant-inflows.htm, https://migrationdataportal.org/data?i=inflow_freemovement&t=2017 (last accessed 30 April 2020).
2 We commit to our preregistered plan. However, we branched out one hypothesis to be addressed within its own paper dealing with potentially heterogeneous effects for different kinds of respondents. This decision was not made based on the results obtained but due to space constraints and conference feedback.
3 Data collection took place between 21 February and 16 March. The survey was fielded at the same time as the COVID-19 crisis accelerated in Germany but finished before Germany issued strict social distance measures on 22 March.
4 Average age of public sector workers in Germany is 44.5 years: http://bit.ly/3sFKaNF; last accessed 15 October 2020.
5 We conducted a pre-test based on 101 respondents to test the understanding of the wording of the questions as well as the quality of responses.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Christian Adam
Christian Adam is Professor of Comparative Politics at Zeppelin University, Germany.
Xavier Fernández-i-Marín
Xavier Fernández-i-Marín is Lecturer at the LMU Munich, Germany.
Oliver James
Oliver James is Professor of Political Science at Exeter University, UK.
Anita Manatschal
Anita Manatschal is Assistant Professor of Migration Policy Analysis at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Carolin Rapp
Carolin Rapp is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Eva Thomann
Eva Thomann is Professor of Public Administration at the University of Konstanz, Germany.