Matariki Recommended Reading List 2025: Waiho mā te arero rātou e hahu ake

20/06/2025

Each year, as we move towards Matariki, I gather the seeds of knowledge I found most valuable in the previous year and offer them to others.

In 2021, I focused on good public sector governance, especially collaboration and anticipatory governance, because the authorising environment was struggling with its theory of public governance. In 2022, I gathered work on decolonising Anglo-American public institutions, to challenge the habit of “brown-cladding” advice instead of doing the more complex work of equity, cost–benefit and institutional analysis.

In 2023, I shared the research base behind a report on equity of access, outcomes, quality and process in vaccination uptake, with particular attention to the Te Ao Māori institutions that produced equity when the state appeared unwilling or unable to do so. Last year, I walked readers through the long arc of public sector reform in Aotearoa, because overseas colleagues were looking at us and seeing something “rough” and “untidy”, and tracing that reform history helped explain why.

This year, my focus is on administrative burden. Public administration scholars use the term to describe the learning, compliance and psychological costs people face when they try to exercise rights or access entitlements (Moynihan, Herd & Harvey, 2015), and those costs are not neutral: they fall hardest on those with the least time, money, language capital and trust in the state.

Much of what is currently branded as “red tape reduction” is, in practice, cost-shifting: moving work, risk and stress off institutions and onto individuals, whānau, small businesses and community organisations. Small changes to forms, processes and eligibility rules can add up to significant additional labour and anxiety for those on the receiving end, even as they are sold as “efficiency” or “simplification”.

This year’s Matariki reading list gathers work that helps us see administrative burden clearly, as a distributive choice, a constitutional question and a design problem, rather than as an irritating side-effect of bureaucracy. I have organised it into four elements of equity, access, participation, outcomes and quality, a quadrant still in progress that I have applied to the Pae Ora health reforms.

As the whakataukī suggests, we keep things alive by talking about them, and these texts help unearth the quiet ways the state can either honour or erode its equity obligations to citizens in practice.

Foundational and theoretical works

These works set out the theory of administrative burden and apply across all four categories.

Bækgaard, M., Moynihan, D. P., & Thomsen, M. K. (2022). Administrative burden: Untangling a bowl of conceptual spaghetti. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 32(1), 1–15.

Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2018). Administrative burden: Policymaking by other means. Russell Sage Foundation.

Moynihan, D., Herd, P., & Harvey, H. (2015). Administrative burden: Learning, psychological, and compliance costs in citizen-state interactions. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 25(1), 43–69. https://academic.oup.com/jpart/article-abstract/25/1/43/885957

Peeters, R. (2021). The political economy of administrative burdens: A theoretical framework for analyzing the organizational origins of administrative burdens. Administration & Society, 53(6), 894–920.

Access

Publications focused on barriers to entering or utilising public programmes and services.

Christensen, J., Aarøe, L., Bækgaard, M., Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. (2020). Human capital and administrative burden: The role of cognitive resources in citizen-state interactions. Public Administration Review, 80(1), 127–136. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.13134

Graff, M. (2024). Reducing administrative burdens in an energy bill assistance program. Public Management Review. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14719037.2024.2335556

Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2025). Administrative burdens in the social safety net. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 39(1), 123–146.

Robben, L., Peeters, R., & Widlak, A. (2024). Burdens on the gateway to the state: Administrative burdens in the registration of people experiencing homelessness in Belgium and the Netherlands. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Participation

Research on the challenges of ongoing engagement and compliance with programme requirements.

Bennett, H., Currie, M., & Podoletz, L. (2024). Universal Credit: Administrative burdens of automated welfare. Journal of Social Policy.

Yaver, M. (2024). Rationing by inconvenience: How insurance denials induce administrative burdens. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 49(1), 7–31.

Outcomes

Studies examining the effects and results of administrative burdens on individuals, communities, and policy goals.

Braunerhjelm, P., & Eklund, J. (2014). Taxes, tax administrative burdens and new firm formation. Kyklos, 67(1), 1–11.

Cantarelli, P., Bellé, N., Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2024). Reducing administrative burdens to increase the take-up of public services: The case of vaccination intentions. Public Management Review.

Carey, G., Malbon, E., & Blackwell, J. (2021). Administering inequality? The National Disability Insurance Scheme and administrative burdens on individuals. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 80(4), 854–872.

Chudnovsky, M., & Peeters, R. (2020). The unequal distribution of administrative burden: A framework and an illustrative case study for understanding variation in people’s experience of burdens. Social Policy & Administration, 54(7), 1179–1193.

Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2020). How administrative burdens can harm health. Health Affairs, 39(10), 1655–1660.

Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2024). Gendered administrative burden: Regulating gendered bodies, labor, and identity. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

Herd, P., Hoynes, H., Michener, J., & Moynihan, D. (2023). Introduction: Administrative burden as a mechanism of inequality in policy implementation. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 9(5), 1–30.

Ray, V., Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. (2022). Racialized burdens: Applying racialized organization theory to the administrative state. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 32(1), 148–164.

Quality

Works that assess the quality of services, citizen experiences, and the role of frontline administrators.

Aarøe, L., Bækgaard, M., Christensen, J., & Moynihan, D. P. (2021). Personality and public administration: Policymaker tolerance of administrative burdens in welfare services. Public Administration, 99(2), 339–355.

Haeder, S. F., & Sylvester, S. M. (2024). I paid into it with every paycheck I earned: How benefit type and beneficiary contributions shape attitudes about increasing or decreasing administrative burdens for social protections. Policy Studies Journal.

Halling, A., & Bækgaard, M. (2023). Administrative burden in citizen-state interactions: A systematic literature review. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 34(2), 180–198.

Halling, A., & Petersen, N. B. G. (2024). Frontline employees’ responses to citizens’ communication of administrative burdens. Public Administration Review.

Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. (2022). Behaviour and burdens. Journal of Behavioural Public Administration, 5(1).

Jilke, S., Bækgaard, M., Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2024). Short and sweet: Measuring experiences of administrative burden. SSRN Electronic Journal.

Nam, J., & Bell, E. (2024). Efficiency or equity? How public values shape bureaucrats’ willingness to use artificial intelligence to reduce administrative burdens. Public Performance & Management Review.