When Bureaucracy Creates Inequality with Gabriela Lotta

Hosts:

· Marius R. Busemeyer – Professor of Comparative Political Economy at the University of Konstanz and Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.

· Gabriele Spilker – Professor of International Politics – Global Inequality at the University of Konstanz and Co-Speaker of the Cluster.

Guest:
Gabriela Lotta is a professor of Public Administration and Government at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in São Paulo. She coordinates the Bureaucracy Studies Center, is professor at the National School of Public Administration (ENAP), and researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM). She has advised and trained several Brazilian governments. Her research focuses on public policy, bureaucracy, implementation, and inequalities in public administration.

Episode overview:

In this episode, we explore why public administration, often perceived as a great equalizer, can nonetheless reproduce or even deepen inequalities. Together with Gabriela Lotta, we discuss the role of street-level bureaucrats – teachers, police officers, social workers, and health workers – who represent the everyday face of the state. How does discretion in bureaucratic practice create both opportunities to reduce inequalities and risks of discrimination? And what can we learn by comparing the Brazilian and German contexts?

Episode highlights:
Equal treatment vs. equal outcomes

• Why uniform rules may disadvantage vulnerable groups
• How intersectionality shapes access to public services
    

Street-level bureaucracy

• Who are street-level bureaucrats and why do they matter
• The role of discretion: balancing flexibility and fairness
• Risks of bias, subjectivity, and unequal treatment
    

Context matters

• Similarities and differences between Brazil and Germany
• The role of culture, institutions, and communication in bureaucratic encounters
    

Reducing inequalities

• A more representative bureaucracy that mirrors society
• Regulating discretion without eliminating it
• Training bureaucrats to prevent stereotypes and discrimination
   

Links and resources

· More about the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz.

· Further reading: 

o   Lotta, G., Pires, R., Hill, M., & Møller, M. O. (2022). Recontextualizing street‐level bureaucracy in the developing world. Public Administration and Development, 42(1), 3-10.

o   Eiró, F., & Lotta, G. (2024). On the frontline of global inequalities: A decolonial approach to the study of street-level bureaucracies. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 34(1), 67-79.

o   Lotta, G. S., Piotrowska, B., & Raaphorst, N. (2024). Introduction “street‐level bureaucracy, populism, and democratic backsliding”. Governance, 37, 5-19.

Mehr über den Exzellenzcluster „The Politics of Inequality“.

More about the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”

Kontakt: cluster.inequality@uni-konstanz.de

Contact: cluster.inequality@uni-konstanz.de

New episodes every first Wednesday of the month – subscribe now!

Transcript

Transkript Staffel 2, Episode 2: “When Bureaucracy Creates Inequality“ with Gabriela Lotta

Gabriele Spilker: 

Welcome to a new episode of the Inequality Podcast. My name is Gabriele Spilker and I'm a professor for Global Inequality at the University of Konstanz and co-speaker of the Cluster of Excellence „The Politics of Inequality“. Next to me sits,

Marius R. Busemeyer:

Marius Busemeyer. I'm a professor of Comparative Political Economy here in Constance as well and speaker of the Cluster.

Gabriele Spilker: 

And our guest today is Gabriela Lotta. Gabriela is a professor and researcher in Public Administration and Government at Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo in Brazil. She's also the coordinator of the Bureaucracy Studies Centre, professor at the National School of Public Administration and researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies. Gabriela also worked with and provided advice, research and training for several Brazilian governments. Most importantly though, at least for us, Gabriela was a Senior Fellow at our Cluster of Excellence „The Politics of Inequality“ this summer and today she's our guest at the Inequality Podcast. Welcome Gabriela.

Gabriela Lotta: 

Thank you very much for having me here. I'm really happy to have this conversation with you.

Gabriele Spilker: 

In her research, Gabriela focuses on public policy, bureaucracy, implementation and government management and we therefore invited Gabriela to talk about inequalities in public administration with a special focus on the role of street-level bureaucrats. So first of all, Gabriela, thank you so much for talking to us today. And let's start with a potential simple question, one that might be very difficult for Germans to understand though, because we always tend to think that the public administration is something very or a great equalizer that treats everyone equal in equal ways. That's at least how we want to see it. And so, the first big question is how can there be inequalities in public administration and potentially what explains that?

Gabriela Lotta: 

Okay, so this is a very hard question but let me try to address it in a way that it makes sense for the German audience as you mentioned. So, the big point is that we constructed over time our governments to provide services equally as you mentioned and this is one of the main principles of the rule of law. So the idea that everyone, it does not matter if it's Marius or Gabriele or me,  anyone who will be treated by the public administration can expect the same kind of treatment, but the point is that our societies have inequalities, of course Germany has less inequalities than Brazil, because Brazil is the one of the most unequal countries in the world, but even in the German context we can find some pockets of inequalities or some publics that are different from other publics. For example, if you think about migrants or if you think about families with disabled children and so on. And the point is that once the public administration treats everyone in the same way, these publics or these specific citizens who have some kind of vulnerabilities or who have some kind of difficulties will be treated in a different way or it will receive a different type of service if they are treated in the same way because they need different types of treatment in order to solve their basic problems or the problems they need to deal with. So, the point is that treating everyone the same way only works if the society is totally homogeneous and if every citizen needs the same kind of service and treatment. But this is not true for many parts of the world, or most parts of the world. This means that we have to develop ways in which the public administration treats people in different ways considering their needs and considering their particularities. And this is what we call treating people in a not equal way, but trying to solve inequalities, treating people in different ways depending on the way they need to be treated. But again, Gabriele, I think this is a trade-off when we think about the rule of law because we're just assuming that the state cannot deal with everyone in the same way and this may be a problem for many societies that believe in the idea of unequal treatment. 

Marius R. Busemeyer:

Yes, but that is very interesting, but I mean simply if I ask a very simple question, couldn't you just have regulations that say, okay, this is a disadvantaged group and so they need more funds to address these special needs and then you do that for other groups as well. Would that work or is that creating new matters of complexity or maybe even new forms of discrimination because then it's about who belongs to that group and who doesn't belong to that group. I think some of this was taking place in this discussion in the United States, but also in other countries about affirmative action and access to higher education, where you have these different groups and it's getting increasingly difficult to put people in these different groups basically, right? And many would probably perceive it as a discrimination by itself.

Gabriela Lotta: 

Exactly, and I would like to add some new complexity to what you mentioned. Of course, treating groups differently would be one way to address the problem I mentioned, but the problem is also that the big groups that we consider usually are not enough to talk about the whole complexity of the society and diversity. So if we think about the idea of intersectionality, for example, I'm not only a woman, I'm a white woman in the Brazilian society that belongs to the high class, but if you think about a black woman that lives in the periphery, that has not gone to school, so she has many things, many characteristics that should be addressed by the government or by the public administration to treat her problems because the things she needs are totally different from the things I need as a citizen. So, the point is that the big groups that we usually think about are not enough. This is one thing that I would like to add as a complexity, but you are talking about something different also, Marius, which is how does the whole society think about this process? Because when you start to separate the groups of the society, you can cause discrimination, you can cause complexities, you can cause the idea of deservingness, so why do some groups deserve more than other groups do? So, we have this discussion here in Brazil, for example, over the last decade we approved a law in Brazil in which 50%s of the positions in the universities for students are for black and poor people. Of course, for rich people who always have gone to universities, this created a sensation that I pay more taxes than they do and now their kids are in the universities, and my kids do not have positions in the universities anymore. Of course, this creates this idea of deservingness, undeservingness, discrimination, what is fair and unfair, but the point is that at the end of the day we want to have more equal societies, we need to treat people based around the diversities. 

Gabriele Spilker: 

I have a follow-up question or maybe a question that even goes before what you started saying in the sense that are we talking only or merely about services that are targeted to specific groups or are we also talking about and that's how I understood your first answer about kind of troubles or problems that certain groups have accessing specific services in a public administration, thinking for instance about migrants, but also about older people, my parents, that might have issues accessing specific services because they, if things become digitized, they just have troubles accessing the forms and cannot do that, so they are treated equally, but since they have certain skills lacking or capacities or don't know how stuff works, they might not be able to access the services that are in principle equally or would be equally available for everyone. Are these two related problems or are they just both valid? 

Gabriela Lotta: 

I think they are totally related, but when I'm thinking about this idea of equality, equity and what it means to be fair and unfair, I'm talking more about the second point you mentioned, so this kind of public administration that is designed to an average kind of citizen that actually does not exist, right? We are all different somehow, but the point is that our public administration because of the idea of rule of law and treating everyone the same way, we design policies to deserve rich kind of citizen and actually when we do it, what we are doing is to exclude many parts of the population that actually needs the services more than others because they cannot have other types of access. So your parents, my parents, families with kids that have special needs or migrants or in Brazil, black people which are 50% of the population, these people cannot be treated the same way I am treated because I have more facilities, like it's easier for me to get access to the service than it is for them. When you think about digitalization, for example, this is a huge thing. I told when I did my talk at the Cluster and my first week at the Cluster, I told the audience that I suffered, I had to face many hours of burdens in order to get access to the printer and at the end of the day… 

Gabriele Spilker: 

…not only you. 

Gabriela Lotta: 

Two months, almost two months there and I could not access the printer because I need to know so many things about the university and how it works and speak German and talk to people and I couldn't do it and I mean, I was a Senior Visitor in Fellowship, you know, but the point is that once we design the rules to treat all the professors the same way, those who come from another place or from another language do not access the system the same way. That's the point I'm making here. So, the point is that how can we design a public administration that looks to this diversity and still considers what is fair, what is justice, the rule of law and so on, but not by excluding people. 

Marius R. Busemeyer:

Yes, maybe we can talk a little bit more about this concept of street-level bureaucracy since you also do a lot of work on this and that's probably, you know, it's to some extent related but it goes even further, I would say, at least as far as I understand it and maybe you just can explain a little bit how you understand it and what it actually means. But basically, you know, we've been talking about policy design in a way, how to design administrative procedures, regulations in a way that that can be more fair and perceived as fair, but the street-level bureaucracy thing adds another layer of below that, right, because it's about the everyday actions of the bureaucrats and no matter what you do in terms of regulation, there will always be this everyday life, the street-level, so to speak. So, can you tell us a little bit, maybe also with examples from Eurus research, what you found out, what happens at the street-level of bureaucracies? 

Gabriela Lotta: 

Perfect. And I will make a connection with what we were discussing, because one way that our public administration tried to solve the problem of how to design policies in a fair way or considering the diversity is to give freedom to those at the front line to solve people's problems the way they can. So, the point is that as we cannot solve everything by policy design, we give freedom to those who implement policies and who interact with the real people, with the real citizens, to interpret the situation and adapt policies to people's needs. So, this is one of the ways that we have been doing as public administration to solve this problem of diversity, complexity that we were talking about. And this is where the street-level bureaucracy literature comes in, because the point is that the state delivers services through people who interact with citizens. Those people who are at the front line of the public services, we name them in the literature, as street-level bureaucrats. So, street-level bureaucrats are those employees, sometimes they work inside the public administration, sometimes they work for the public administration, but they represent the state interacting with citizens to implement services. The main examples are police officers, teachers, health workers, social workers and so on. So actually, in Brazil, for example, they are 70% of public employees, they are the majority of public administration actually. And the point is that once the service is designed, the public policy is designed, it has to be materialized in real encounters. So, we designed the education policy, but actually what is the education policies, what teachers do inside classrooms with real kids, and what real kids receive as the policy depends on how the teachers interact with them. That's what we call the discretion that these street-level bureaucrats have. This means the freedom they have to adapt, to interact, to communicate, to talk to people and at the end of the day to make the final decisions of how policies will be implemented. And there's something very important, there are many important things about street-level bureaucrats, but I just want to mention something before we go on with the conversation, which is they are the face of the state for citizens, because if you ask for a regular citizen, an average citizen, who is the state, do you like the state? Do you think the state represents you? What they think about is about the teachers, it's about the police, it's not about the mayor or the governor or the president, it's about real people they meet. So, this is why it's very important to think about street-level bureaucrats, because it's not only about policy implementation, it's also about state representativeness, like how the state is represented. 

Gabriele Spilker: 

And if I understood you correctly, on the one hand it would be, or it's sensible or it's good to give these street-level bureaucrats a high amount of discretion in order for them to really judge, oh, this is a situation in which I should be more lenient, helpful, or in which I should be potentially more stricter, to really enforce the rules in order to treat unequal people, in an unequal way, to at the end of the day, hopefully result in a more or less equal outcome. To me, it seems that there still might be like a tension or a trade-off between this discretion and having clear-cut rules and making sure they do what they're supposed to do. Is this just me seeing this this way or is that indeed something that you observe in the research? 

Gabriela Lotta: 

That's exactly the main point of the discussion about street-level bureaucracy, Gabriele, which means we need them to have discretion, otherwise we could just replace them by robots. Why don't we do it? Because we need some kind of judgment at the front line of public services. Some of them we already replaced it, okay, because it was possible to replace. But when we need, and in cases where we need some kind of judgment, interpretation, we need people, and they have to have discretion. But at the same time, their discretion can at the end of the day change completely the policies, can cause discrimination, they can violate any kind of principle or rule of law, for example, of fairness, and so on, based on many elements, okay? I'm not talking that I'm not saying that they are bad people necessarily. But the point that we need them to judge means that we are bringing a lot of subjectivity to the service. And this can always be a problem. So, this is the main trade-off that we have when we talk about street-level bureaucrats. But the point is that this also depends on the kind of service we are talking about. Because for example, if we go to a kind of service that makes documents, we have to take the passport. We need the visa to go to the US. We want to be treated the same way as everyone. I don't want to have a passport, a pink passport, and my son has a blue passport. And the colour of the passport depends on the humour of the street-level bureaucrats. This is not a good way to go, okay? But we need this kind of discretion for teachers, because teachers have to deal with very different types of students and classrooms. And sometimes they have to be stricter to rules. And sometimes they have to be more flexible, because the class is different from the other. So, we need this much more discretion in some services than in other services. And the point is that we have to regulate the amount of discretion when we design policies. And one of the main problems we have now in public administration is that we are not thinking about discretion as these strategic elements that has to be regulated when we design policies. 

Gabriele Spilker: 

Super interesting. Maybe a stupid question, but how do you regulate discretion? 

Gabriela Lotta: 

We have two ways to regulate discretion. One of them is to think about the size of discretion. So, I will come back to my stupid example. Should street-level bureaucrat regulate the size, the colour of the documents? No, they should not. So, we regulate the size. This is something they should not have discretion to do. Should teachers think about the curriculum, interpret the curriculum? Should teacher design the PowerPoints they use? Should they have discretion to do this or not? So, this is the regulation about the size of discretion. In which kind of activities and procedures should they have discretion or not? This is one thing. The other thing is how to regulate the exercise of discretion. Because I can say, okay, teachers have discretion to design their own materials. Each teacher will do what they want. But as a manager, I will teach them the main values, principles or elements that they should consider when they are designing the PowerPoints. So, I teach them how to use the discretion, but still, they have discretion. This is another way not to diminish discretion, but to regulate or to influence the use of discretion that they will use. 

Marius R. Busemeyer:

Maybe I can bring in another example of labour market policy because it's also a big field where street-level bureaucracy matters. And then this goes a little bit back to the discussion we had before about how to set the parameters of different bureaucratic procedures. And I mean, again, asking a maybe naive question, what kind of power do you have with this? How exactly can you regulate this discretionary space, as you call it? So, if you for instance say, well, the street-level bureaucrat gets extra points or gets rewarded in some kind of internal reward system if you manage to put somebody back to work, right? Or maybe especially rewarded if you put somebody, a long-term unemployed person back to work. Can't you then not reprogram the settings in a way that they potentially help these especially vulnerable groups by limiting, you know, selectively this discretionary decision-making by setting incentives, so to speak, to follow certain rules that could prevent or maybe even counteract this kind of discrimination? Or does it not work in practice? 

Gabriela Lotta: 

It works, not alone, but it works. So, we know that there are three main groups of factors that influence the way street-level bureaucrats use their discretion. One of them is about individual factors. So, if it's a man or a woman, if it's a migrant or not migrant, so depending on the characteristics that this person brings to the service, this helps explaining how they use discretion. The second group of factors are organizational factors. So, we know that, for example, the way they are managed, the incentives they have, if they have more deliberative or less deliberative kind of organizations, this changes the way they use discretion. The third factor is about the society. So, a teacher, a female teacher teaching in Germany is probably very different the way this same person would teach in Brazil, because culture matters, the society matters, and so on. The point is that if the service, the managers, do not try to influence, this means improving the role of organizational factors, then the other factors will matter more. And we can do it by incentives, by training, by control, by systems of accountability. And again, if we don't do this, and we have many examples in Brazil in which we do not manage well, this means that individual factors or social factors will be much more important than the others. So, for example, we had a research in Brazil that shows, for example, that when we lack incentives, training, and so on, religion, the religion of the street-level bureaucrats matters a lot, because he brings these individual factors which are not buffered, are not filtered by the manager,

the managerial system. 

Gabriele Spilker: 

This leads me to another question you said repeatedly in the Brazilian context versus the German context. And that really lends for the big question, how important is this country context and how different is really Germany to Brazil, I mean, on many accounts, but how important is it for this question about inequalities in either public administration or street-level bureaucracy? So, what can you say from your research on these differences?

Gabriela Lotta: 

First, I like to think that it matters a lot. So, of course, as I just mentioned, working in

Brazil, or I can say by myself, being a professor in Brazil or being a professor in Germany, I

am a totally different person in the way I behave, because I know about these non-said rules that are part of the society. So, it matters. But at the same time, I like to frame our context as part of a huge explanation. What do I mean here? If we only say that Brazil is very different from Germany, why would my research matter to a German scholar? Would not, because I would only say about the differences. But I like to frame, is to say that Brazil is an extreme case in terms of inequalities, for example, is an extreme case in terms of weak institutions, is an extreme case in terms of fragmentations and other issues. But you in Germany also have many of these issues in a smaller proportion. You also have inequalities. You also have fragmentation. You also have weak institutions in some parts of the state. So, I prefer to frame this in this way, because then we can say, how can Brazil learn from Germany and how can Germany learn from Brazil? I think we have many common issues. And again, I can say this by expanding a few months there.

Marius R. Busemeyer:

Maybe I can ask one thing about the specific element of this cultural context, namely the

role of language. Because here in the Cluster, we have a number of linguists working alongside political administration experts and political scientists and so on. And they've looked at the way language is used in these encounters between street-level bureaucrats and their customers, so to speak. And how maybe people use different kinds of languages when they deal with different kinds of people. And you also mentioned before that this issue of representativeness is also a question for bureaucracy, because if you have the feeling that you're talking to somebody like you on the other side, that maybe changes the way you interact with the bureaucracy and the changes the way you put trust in the state and so on. So, what can you say in your research about these issues? 

Gabriela Lotta: 

Yeah. So, when we talk about street- level bureaucracy, the main point is this interaction. So, we are talking about someone interacting with someone to deliver a service and make decisions. It's about interactions and interactions are about language, are about communication, not only oral language, verbal language, but also the body, how you behave, if you stand, if you sit, if you smile or not smile. These changes completely how the interaction goes on and the perceptions that citizens have about how the state works and also the perceptions street-level bureaucrats have about how citizens are working or are doing or not doing what is expected for them. I have been working with this idea in a different way. Stefan Eckhard is working now in the Cluster with an amazing research about communication and language and analysing interactions in that way. I have been working in a different perspective over time in which I look at interactions in a more sociological way. So, it's not only about language, as I mentioned, but about the power relations that go on during this conversation and how both sides change the way they communicate in order to do what they want to do. So, I will give one example of something I've been looking for so over time. One of the main workers, street-level bureaucrats I've been studying is what we have in Brazil named as community health workers. There are some experiences also in Germany about community health workers. There are some ones from the community that talk to people delivering health services, but in a non- how can I say- less institutionalized way because their role is to make the bridge between the system and the community. I have done many ethnographies with them and many interviews, and the main thing that the main power community health workers have is to translate the medical language, the administrative language into people's lives language. I always use one phrase that I collected in which they say, “Oh, your kid has fever. Give her paracetamol, take her to a prayer, and if she still has fever, take her to the doctor”. So, she's just mixing, the health worker is just mixing religion with medicine, with the system, and she's just translating into something that makes sense to people's lives. So, this idea of interaction and communication is very important when we think about street-level bureaucrats, because they actually, and there are some research showing this, if they only reproduce the administrative language, what they are doing is to create a barrier, a power barrier saying, here we treat these things in one way in which you are not part of it. So, it's again about representativeness, how much the state can interact with people's language, with what makes sense for citizens. 

Gabriele Spilker: 

Very, very interesting. If you had like three wishes for free to make or to reduce inequalities, either in street-level bureaucracy or in public administration, what would they be? 

Gabriela Lotta: 

Oh my god. I think the first one would be to think more about our representative bureaucracy. What does it mean? So, this is a concept that we are treating in the literature, which means making the bureaucracy more representative of the society. If we have in Brazil, for example, we have 50% black people, 50% of white people, but in the bureaucracy, we only have 30% of black people. So, black people are not represented in the state. And this is a problem because citizens see the state, and they do not see themselves represented them. Also, bureaucrats many times do not make decisions that are in favour of citizens because they do not know the reality of citizens. So, the first point would be to improve the idea of representativeness. The second one would be to create systems of regulations as we were talking about, in which we could have more adaptation to the citizens diversity. And of course, and again, this depends on the context because what is diversity in Germany is different from what is the diversity in our case. But I think we are very good in public administration, in designing this kind of average policies for everyone. We are not good in designing policies that can be adapted in a good way in the local level. So, I think this would be the second one to design in a way I give enough discretion, not more nor less, enough discretion and create a system in which adaptation would be in pro-equity or equality. And the third one would be to work on the other side, which means training street-level bureaucrats to interpret in a good way what is going on at the ground, what citizens need and so on. And to use the discretion in a way they generate equity and not in a way they generate discrimination or bias and so on. So, teach people to prevent stereotypes, to prevent discrimination and so on. So, I would also think about this third element. 

Gabriele Spilker: 

That sounds very good. Gabriela, before we stop here, I have one question out of curiosity. Are we, the three of us, are we also street-level bureaucrats? I mean, I've never, I was never thinking about this or that in this way, but in some sense, I mean, as professors we are, aren't we? 

Gabriela Lotta: 

I say we are. So, part of the literature does not agree with us because they say that professors have too much discretion and actually, they do many things that are not related to delivering services, but I'm sure that when we are in a classroom dealing with the students, we are street-level bureaucrats. We represent the state, we have to interpret the rules, we have to deliver services. So, we are the state for them and in that part of our work, I'm sure we are street-level bureaucrats. 

Marius R. Busemeyer:

But not if you work for a private university.

Gabriele Spilker: 

That's right, but as we don't, we from now on have an additional drop title. We are street-level bureaucrats. Thank you so much, Gabriela. That was an amazing podcast. It was super interesting to talk to you. 

Marius R. Busemeyer:

Thanks a lot. 

Gabriela Lotta: 

It was really nice. Thank you. Thank you. 

Gabriele Spilker: 

And to all of our audience out there, please listen in every first Wednesday of the month. There is a new Inequality Podcast episode.

Gabriele Spilker- Marius R. Busemeyer:

Bye.

 (This transcript was created using AI.)