Biased by the Media? : The Occurrence and Mitigation of Discrimination in German Welfare Offices

Abstract

Whether it be renewing an identity card, registering as a jobseeker, seeking childcare, or receiving a pension—encounters with public administrators accompany citizens throughout the course of life. These officials are often referred to as street-level bureaucrats, a term famously coined by Lipsky (1980, 2010), as they implement public services in direct interactions with the public and exercise discretion. Yet, this discretion carries the risk of discriminatory treatment when stereotypes feed into decisions. While existing studies identify various principals and contextual explanations that influence how administrators decide as implementing agents, the role of the media context remains underexplored. This dissertation develops the media-driven discrimination cycle as a new theoretical mechanism to explain how immigration-related news coverage activates stereotypes and influences bureaucratic decision-making (see Chapter 2). The cycle consists of three key stages, which I explore in the respective empirical chapters. In Chapter 3, “Regional News, Regional Bias: Unequal Sanction Decisions in Welfare Offices”, I argue that immigration discourses in regional news outlets activate stereotypes and make them cognitively accessible, subconsciously feeding into decisions of street-level bureaucrats (the activation stage). To examine this relationship, I leverage a novel dataset combining longitudinal state-level data on benefit reduction rates of the German welfare program Citizen’s Benefit with regional media reports from 2010 to 2020. Through panel data analysis, I find that foreign nationals face reduced sanction risks in regions where positive topics are prevalent. In contrast, media coverage emphasizing immigration as a financial burden is associated with increased sanction risks for refugees. These results highlight the critical role of the regional media environment in shaping bureaucratic behavior. Co-authored with Gerald Schneider and Jan Vogler, Chapter 4, “How Negative News About Immigration Activates Illiberal Norms: Bureaucratic Discrimination Across German States”, starts with the observation that recent research on the rise of radical right-wing parties highlights the normalization of deeply rooted illiberal norms in society. We posit that such norms in the regional social context, especially anti-immigrant sentiments, influence how strongly negative media reporting affects bureaucratic-decision-making due to selective information processing (the reinforcement stage). To empirically test this, we conducted a preregistered survey experiment with a random sample of 1400 caseworkers in 60 German job centers in June/July 2023, including a vignette with negative newspaper articles and a conjoint experiment on hypothetical welfare decision scenarios. Our findings reveal that negative news frames relating immigration to crime increase the likelihood of discrimination, which is reinforced in contexts of widespread regional anti-immigrant sentiments. These findings raise concerns about the impartiality of state institutions amidst rising illiberal norms and negative news reporting. Together, the media and social context form a self-reinforcing cycle of biases. To disrupt this cycle, I argue in Chapter 5, “The Pursuit of Fairness: Can Media Literacy Interventions Mitigate Discrimination in Welfare Offices?”, that media literacy interventions can target the psychological mechanisms underlying media-driven biases (the disruption stage). To empirically investigate these dynamics, I conducted a preregistered survey experiment in November/December 2024, involving 582 caseworkers from 35 German job centers. Half of the participants are randomly assigned to the intervention, presenting two contrasting newspaper articles on the same migration study. The results demonstrate that media literacy training reduces discriminatory behavior, highlighting the potential of media literacy interventions as an innovative tool to promote fairness in welfare offices. The main insight is that news coverage of immigration shapes the decisions of street-level bureaucrats in multiple ways, depending on regional factors and beneficiary groups (see Chapter 6). Regional news contributes to or diminishes unequal treatment of ethnic minority clients depending on the dominant media discourse. In regions with widespread anti-immigrant attitudes, negative news stories have the most detrimental effects on immigrants’ access to benefits. But media literacy training can mitigate this unfavorable treatment. Thus, to ensure that decisions are based on objective criteria, strategies such as balanced media reporting and proactive countermeasures are important to reduce discrimination in public administration.