A cascade of exclusion: administrative burdens and access to citizenship in the case of Argentina’s National Identity Document

Abstract

Administrative burdens can hinder people’s social, political and economic participation. However, most empirical studies usually tackle the issue of how they affect access to citizenship merely indirectly. This article examines administrative exclusion from Argentina’s National Identity Document and its effects on a key social policy: the Universal Child Allowance. Findings indicate that: (1) administrative exclusion from official identity documents ‘feeds back’ into the construction of a vulnerable target group that is systematically excluded from social benefits and public services; and (2) limitations in the administrative capacity for identity registration and documentation ‘trickle down’ to complications in the implementation of social policies as target groups remain ‘off the radar’. Findings also demonstrate the importance of understanding administrative burdens as a systemic issue. Burdens manifest themselves at the level of citizen–state interactions but their causes and consequences are tied up with intractable institutional characteristics, administrative capacities and social inequalities.

Points for practitioners

Efforts by developing countries to develop effective social protection systems are often thwarted by limitations in the state’s capacity to identify and reach marginalized citizens. This suggests the need for a systemic perspective of the state’s entire capacity instead of merely focusing on the design of social protection programmes. Specifically, we demonstrate that complete, accessible and up-to-date civil registries, identity documents and other forms of registration are a precondition for transforming formal rights into a tangible reality for citizens.

Keywords

administrative burdens administrative exclusion citizenship identity documents social policy

Introduction

The study of administrative burdens has, in recent years, demonstrated how bureaucratic barriers in citizen–state interactions can hinder people’s access to rights, benefits and services (e.g. Heinrich, 2016; Herd and Moynihan, 2018). This is consistent with the approach’s more fundamental claim that administrative burdens can affect people’s social, political and economic participation (Moynihan and Herd, 2010). However, studies often only indirectly tackle the relation between administrative burdens and citizenship. Instead, scholarly attention has been ‘most prominent at the intersection of public administration and social policy’ (Moynihan et al., 2015: 47), such as social programmes (Barnes and Henly, 2018), health care (Moynihan et al., 2016) and welfare benefits (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010).

A handful of recent publications on the role of administrative burdens in access to official identity documents and registration (Heinrich, 2018; Nisar, 2018; Peeters and Widlak, 2018) suggest two consequences of administrative burdens that analyses of more isolated case studies on social policies tend to overlook. First, administrative burdens can trigger ‘policy feedback mechanisms’ (Moynihan and Soss, 2014) that shape distinct social groups. Administrative burdens in obtaining official identity documents contribute to the construction of a social group that is systematically excluded from social benefits and public services for which official identification is an administrative requirement. Second, administrative burdens may be experienced at the street level but often have systemic causes (Peeters, 2020). For instance, limitations in the state’s capacity to register and document identity ‘trickle down’ to complications in access to social rights.

In the following, we answer the question how administrative burdens can hinder access to official identity documents and how this, in turn, implies exclusion from citizenship rights. We do this by providing evidence that exclusion from an official identity document triggers a ‘cascade of exclusion’, such as exclusion from social protection and benefits. We have selected the case of Argentina because it has an almost universal social protection policy – Universal Child Allowance (Asignación Universal por Hijo (AUH)) – with the lowest administrative burdens in Latin America. However, access depends on the administrative requirement of possessing Argentina’s only National Identity Document (Documento Nacional de Identidad (DNI)), the provision of which is the responsibility of a different agency that, in turn, exhibits low capacity to reach the poorest socio-economic strata. In sum, we show that administrative exclusion from the DNI jeopardizes access to Argentina’s largest social protection programme, especially for the most vulnerable target groups.

Hence, the analysis of the Argentinean DNI and AUH cases indicates that administrative burdens exist within a broader context of limited state capacity, administrative-political interests and social inequalities that determine the dynamics of state–citizen interactions (Peeters, 2020; Shamsul Haque and Puppim de Oliveira, 2020). Evidence also contributes to understanding why people in developing countries often face higher burdens in their interactions with the state (Heinrich, 2016; Peeters et al., 2018). The argument is structured as follows. First, we discuss the literature on administrative burdens, highlighting the approach’s relevance for the construction of citizenship. Second, we present the findings of the case study on administrative exclusion from the DNI. Third, we illustrate the consequences of exclusion from the DNI for citizens through the AUH case. Fourth and finally, the concluding section reflects on the importance of understanding administrative burdens as a systemic issue with profound effects on the construction of citizenship.

Administrative burdens and citizenship

Administrative burdens

The literature on administrative burdens has, in recent years, identified how bureaucratic barriers can complicate people’s access to services and benefits for citizens. Administrative burdens are defined as an ‘individual’s experience of policy implementation as onerous’ (Burden et al., 2012: 741). Burdens can lead to learning, compliance and psychological costs (Moynihan et al., 2015), or even to ‘administrative exclusion’ (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010) from access to rights, services and benefits. Evidence indicates that their consequences extend beyond a material loss of time and money, and also impact people’s ability to participate socially and economically (Bruch et al., 2010). Moreover, burdens produce ‘feedback mechanisms’ (Moynihan and Soss, 2014), which can be understood as policy outcomes that shape subsequent political participation, attitudes and distribution of power in the form of people’s ‘orientations toward the institutions and policies of government’ (Mettler and Soss, 2004: 62) and the construction of social groups that are structurally excluded from public services and social benefits (Heinrich, 2018).

Furthermore, administrative burdens are distributive. Vulnerable social groups tend to be ‘administratively disadvantaged’ (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010: 828), leading to, for instance, low participation in and negative experiences of targeted social programmes (Barnes and Henly, 2018). Even though the jury is still out on what exactly explains this, there are strong indications that human capital, attitudes towards the state and decision-making mechanisms are crucial for understanding why some people are more affected by the same administrative burdens than others (Christensen et al., 2020; Chudnovsky and Peeters, 2020).

Finally, the literature highlights that administrative burdens are often constructed. Understood as a form of ‘hidden politics’ (Moynihan et al., 2015) or ‘policymaking by other means’ (Herd and Moynihan, 2018), burdens may be designed into bureaucratic procedures for political purposes of restricting access to public services and social benefits that are overly in demand or deemed politically undesirable (Soss et al., 2011). The construction of operational dysfunction is an attractive, low-profile and effective tactic that avoids complex policymaking or legislative procedures.

Administrative burdens as a systemic issue

Without discrediting the merits of the research done so far, the three aforementioned claims are mostly based on empirical studies that emphasize individual cases over analysis of more systemic factors. First, while examining the consequences of administrative burdens for citizens is consistent with the approach’s more fundamental claim that administrative burdens are crucial for citizenship (Moynihan and Herd, 2010), most of the actual empirical work within the administrative burdens framework only indirectly touches upon these topics and has, instead, focused on access barriers in social policies (Moynihan et al., 2015: 47), such as social programmes (Herd, 2015), health care and insurance (Moynihan et al., 2016), and welfare benefits (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010).

Second, the relatively few empirical studies on explaining ‘why some people find the same objective sets of rules or procedures more onerous or emotionally taxing than others’ (Christensen et al., 2020: 132), highlight factors that lie outside the control of individuals, such as age, mental and physical health, educational level, and poverty (Christensen et al., 2020; Chudnovsky and Peeters, 2020). This suggests the importance of more structural vulnerabilities and inequalities for the distributive nature of burdens. However, studies mostly focus on how these factors influence individuals’ human capital needed for navigating burdens.

Third, rather than the product of political or strategic behaviour, less-examined explanations show that burdens may also have unintentional origins (Peeters, 2020). Besides more down-to-earth explanations such as benign neglect (Moynihan and Herd, 2010: 664) and administrative errors (Widlak and Peeters, 2020), studies have indicated the importance of, among other things, an organization’s information architecture (Peeters and Widlak, 2018), administrative capacity (Tabor, 2002) and level of professionalization (Heinrich and Brill, 2015: 279–280). This suggests that administrative burdens are tied up with systemic and intractable institutional practices, characteristics and capacities.

While administrative burdens may manifest themselves at the most basic level of citizen–state interactions, their causes and consequences can only be properly understood if studied in relation to their broader social, political and administrative context, including issues such as citizenship, social inequalities and institutional design and capacity. Contributions at this more systemic level include, for example, grounding the administrative burdens approach in the policy feedback tradition (Moynihan and Herd, 2010). Negative bureaucratic experiences feed back into people’s attitudes and expectations regarding the state (Moynihan and Soss, 2014), and send messages about their place in society (Auyero, 2011; Mettler and Soss, 2004), which, in turn, can make citizens wary of seeking access to services and benefits (Chudnovsky and Peeters, 2020). Another example is how state capacity and social inequality affect administrative burdens and exclusion in developing contexts (Heinrich and Brill, 2015). For instance, faced with large social inequalities and capacity restraints, governments in these contexts are often forced to focalize their social policies through means-tested targeting (Fiszbein and Schady, 2009). This not only contributes to errors of exclusion (Robles Aguilar, 2014), but also places administrative burdens on already vulnerable citizens by demanding additional information regarding income, family situation and identification.

Constructing citizenship

Proof of identity, residence or citizenship is a fundamental access point to the state. For citizens, it is a key administrative requirement for access to rights, legal protection and most public services and benefits – including the social programmes, health care and welfare benefits that have been so widely studied in administrative burden research. For the state, an apparatus capable of proper registration and documentation – such as civil registries, fiscal numbers, birth certificates and family and income data – is a precondition for, among other things, taxation, criminal justice and determining eligibility for social benefits.

Relatively few scholars have studied systems of registration, identification and documentation from an administrative burden perspective. Three exceptions teach us important lessons that analyses of more isolated case studies on social policies tend to overlook. First, through a case study of the burdens that a marginalized social group in Pakistan faces in obtaining a legal identity document, Nisar (2018) argues that the growing importance of a legal ID in Pakistani society, which is increasingly required at security checkpoints, for job applications or to sell property, might reduce burdens for most citizens but places vulnerable groups at an even bigger distance from society. Second, Peeters and Widlak’s (2018) study of the Dutch civil registry shows how the loss of residence status due to administrative burdens triggers the loss of access to every benefit or service for which proof of legal residency is a precondition – ranging from health care insurance, to parking permits, state pension contributions and receiving voting ballots. Third, Heinrich (2018) shows how the burdens that Texas state authorities place on the acceptance of the consular identification document – often used by undocumented Mexican immigrants – not only complicate the legal status of the directly affected immigrants, but also have a profound impact on their children’s access to health care and schooling.

These studies suggest that, first, exclusion from access to citizenship – in the form of an official identity document or residence status – often implies exclusion from other benefits and services as well. Thereby, exclusion ‘feeds back’ (see Moynihan and Soss, 2014) into the construction of a social group that is systematically excluded from access to the state. Second, the implementation of social policies is complicated because of the state’s reduced ability to reach out to vulnerable groups living ‘off the radar’. In other words, limitations in the state’s capacity to register and document the identity of all its citizens ‘trickles down’ to policy inefficiency. In the following, a case study of administrative burdens in the application procedure for Argentina’s DNI is presented to better understand these feedback mechanisms and how these complicate the successful implementation of social policies targeted at vulnerable groups.

Research design

Case selection

Cases were selected for their theoretical utility. The study of the non-take-up of the DNI – Argentina’s main identity document for citizens and alien residents – was conducted to answer the question what role administrative burdens have in explaining people’s non-take-up of official identity documents. In order to illustrate the systemic consequences of administrative exclusion from this identity document, a case study was conducted of the non-take-up of the AUH – Argentina’s main social programme targeted at vulnerable groups. Argentina serves as a critical case because it has an almost universal social protection policy, with the lowest administrative burdens in Latin America (Chudnovksy and Peeters, 2020). If the expected effects of documentation problems are observed here, it can be assumed that the findings can be generalized to other social policies and other countries in the region (Miles et al., 2014: 32).

The DNI case allows for an analysis of the relation between administrative burdens and citizenship since it is Argentina’s universal access requirement for state benefits and services. Furthermore, it can be assumed that significant problems exist with DNI coverage – despite access to identity documents being a formal right under Argentinean law. According to the most recent available data, 168,000 persons in urban sectors, aged between 0 and 17 years and born in Argentina did not have a DNI in 2011 (Tuñón et al., 2012). The AUH case allows for a focus on the consequences of exclusion from the DNI since this is one of the few administrative requirements for obtaining access to the benefit. Moreover, as the country’s main social programme, the AUH case is illustrative of the consequences of exclusion from the DNI.

Data collection

Data on population coverage and the formal procedure for obtaining and renewing the DNI were obtained through document analysis, three interviews with public officials and one expert interview with the Director of Argentina’s main non-governmental organization (NGO) for the promotion of access to identity documents, the Instituto Abierto para el Desarrollo y Estudio de Políticas Públicas (IADEPP). Interviewees were selected because of their experience with and knowledge of the DNI application procedure. Data on the role of administrative burdens in this procedure come from 15 interviews with citizens that do not have the DNI, held in some of the most precarious settlements in Argentina.

Data for the AUH case were also obtained through document analysis and interviews. Data on the programme’s coverage among the target population come from a study by Chudnovsky and Peeters (2020) of a 2015 government survey. Interviews were held with the aforementioned expert from the DNI case, with four officials from the National Social Security Administration (Administración Nacional de la Seguridad Social (ANSES)) – the organization responsible for eligibility registration – and with 11 citizens in the same precarious settlements as where the interviews for the DNI case were held. All interviewed citizens were eligible for the AUH but administratively excluded because they did not possess the DNI. They were asked about the consequences of not having access to the AUH, as well as their outlook on access to the state in general. The expert and ANSES officials were asked about registration and documentation as preconditions for policy success and about the social consequences of the non-take-up of the AUH.

Interviews were held between February and May 2019 and in January 2020. Interviews with civil servants were recorded and transcribed. For privacy and security reasons, no audio recordings could be made of the interviews with citizens. Instead, extensive field notes were made. Following the objective of the study, interviews with citizens were held in some of the country’s most vulnerable communities in the Buenos Aires province. Due to practical access limitations, rural communities were not taken into account, even though large geographical distance to the state might cause additional administrative burdens. Interviewees were selected in the field through a snowball method. The sampling was theoretically driven (Miles et al., 2014: 33). The objective of the case studies is not to measure and explain non-coverage of DNI and AUH, but to demonstrate the role of administrative burdens in the construction of citizenship and to illustrate the systemic consequences of administrative exclusion from official identity documents. Accordingly, interviewees were selected up to the point of theoretical saturation (Corbin and Strauss, 2008). More information on the data collection and the interviewee profiles is provided in a methodological appendix (available online at https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/suppl/10.1177/0020852320984541).

Data analysis

The research strategy followed here is ‘abductive’, which combines elements of induction and deduction (Mantere and Ketokivi, 2013). This strategy is useful for developing new hypotheses or theoretical explanations (Ashworth et al., 2018; Tavory and Timmermans, 2014). The interview data were collected with very limited theoretical preconceptions, whereas more explicit theoretical notions were used for the data analysis. Regarding the DNI interviews, ‘deductive coding’ (Miles et al., 2014: 81) of the field notes and transcripts followed the logic of finding evidence for the role of administrative burdens in the construction of citizenship. Data were analysed using codes derived from the administrative burdens framework developed by Moynihan and others (2015), which distinguishes between: (1) learning costs, that is, references to learning about the DNI, its administrative requirements and the application procedure; (2) psychological costs, that is, references to stress, stigmatization or loss of autonomy in the procedure for obtaining the DNI; and (3) compliance costs, that is, references to paperwork, waiting times, financial costs and other access requirements. For the AUH interviews, coding of the field notes and transcripts followed the logic of finding evidence for the systemic consequences of administrative exclusion from the DNI. The data were analysed using codes based on the two previously developed assumptions regarding the ‘trickle-down effects’ and ‘feedback mechanisms’. More information on the data analysis is provided in a methodological appendix (available online at https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/suppl/10.1177/0020852320984541).

DNI: administrative burdens in access to citizenship

DNI coverage and formal procedure

Argentina’s DNI can be obtained after birth and must be renewed at eight and 14 years of age, and thereafter every 15 years. It states a person’s name, sex, nationality, date of birth and unique document number, and includes a photograph, signature and fingerprint of the card holder. The DNI is issued by the National Registry of Persons (Registro Nacional de las Personas (RENAPER)), an agency of the Ministry of the Interior. The DNI is a requirement for access to a very broad range of services: from obtaining a credit card, to accessing social programmes, health care, education and voting. Figure 1 illustrates the basic steps needed to obtain the DNI.

Figure 1.

Steps to obtain the DNI.

Three documents are required to apply for the DNI (IADEPP, 2018; Poder Ciudadano, 2007): first, the registration of birth by the hospital in the corresponding municipality; second, the inscription of the birth certificate, including full name, place of birth and parent information, which is a provincial responsibility; and, third, the registration of the child’s biometric data and the assignation of a unique and non-transferable number, which is a federal responsibility. The last two steps must be performed by the parents in the city where the child was born. Afterwards, citizens can obtain the DNI at the civil registry of each locality in the country, as well as in rapid documentation centres (RDCs) located in various shopping malls and airports. The first renewal at age eight costs 300 pesos and has the child’s signature, photo and fingerprint.¹ The second renewal at age 14 involves similar procedures and fees. In case of loss of the DNI, a replacement document costs 300 pesos. After four new copies of the document, the cost increases to 450 pesos.

Given that the first step is performed immediately after birth and the next two are not, almost all children in Argentina are registered but not necessarily inscribed and identified at a civil registry – a situation called ‘under registration’, which applies to around 7% of all children between 0 and 5 years old in Argentina (Harbitz et al., 2010; cf. Brito et al., 2013).² Argentinean provinces have a legal obligation to register births through civil registries at the local level but many have insufficient capacity to fulfil this responsibility (IADEPP, 2018). A child is considered a case of ‘under registration’ if registration at the civil registry is not completed within the child’s first year (IADEPP, 2018). If parents seek to obtain the DNI after this point, they must follow a different administrative procedure in a provincial registry, which involves a payment of 300 pesos, whereas the DNI is free of cost during the child’s first year. This procedure currently covers children up to 12 years old. After that age, a more complicated judicial process must be carried out to obtain the DNI.

Data regarding the population coverage of the DNI are scarce. The existing data, however, indicate a clear correlation between socio-economic vulnerability and non-coverage. In 2011, 168,000 persons in urban sectors, aged between 0 and 17 years and born in Argentina did not have the DNI, which is equivalent to 1.6% of that age range (Tuñón et al., 2012). Of this group, those living in the province of Buenos Aires, which surrounds the city and is one of the most vulnerable areas of the country, have a three times higher probability of being undocumented (1.8%) than those living in other cities of the country (0.6%) (Tuñón et al., 2012). This correlates with data on different socio-economic groups, which show that a child in the first socio-economic quartile has a 2.5 times higher probability of not having the DNI than their peers in the highest socio-economic quartile. The same pattern is observed when analysing household characteristics: the probability of not having the DNI is higher in single-parent households and in households with a larger number of children (Tuñón et al., 2012).

These results are confirmed by another study, which shows that 57% of all the people that have never had the DNI and/or birth certificate are from the very low social stratum and a further 26% from the low stratum (Calvelo et al., 2017: 6). Likewise, it is estimated that 73% of all people that at one point had the DNI before losing it (for instance, because they failed to renew it) belong to the very low stratum and 18.9% to the low stratum (Calvelo et al., 2017).

Citizen interviews: experience of administrative burdens

Based on the typology by Moynihan and others (2015), Table 1 summarizes the costs of administrative burdens in the DNI procedure mentioned in the interviews with citizens.

Table 1.

Administrative burdens in the DNI procedure mentioned by citizens.

Type of costs	Incidence (86 in 15 interviews)	Sample quote
Learning costs	19 (in 14/15 interviews)	‘I had my baby at 15 and he didn’t have documentation. Neither do I and I was a child too. They did not explain…. At no point does anyone give you an explanation of how to do it as it was not considered a priority’ (Brenda, 27)
Psychological costs	12 (in 6/15 interviews)	‘I always had to carry tons of papers with me. I had about 10 papers of my son and I gave those papers to enrol him in school and they looked at me as if I were an irresponsible mother who never worried about getting her son’s ID’ (Karen, 26)
Compliance costs	55 (in 15/15 interviews)	‘The truth is that because it is difficult to get a DNI, you have to get to know people who can help you.… It is not a short process either, so you must have time and money to go’ (Belén, 27)

Learning costs

Learning costs are observed in the form of misinformation about the costs of the DNI and a general lack of information about the application procedure. In the interviews, there is a repeated misunderstanding regarding the need to pay for the DNI. Formally, there are two ways of obtaining the first DNI: one is free (at the provincial civil registry and at RENAPER’s central office); and the other – at the RDCs located in various shopping malls and airports – not only involves a payment, but also requires a bank card. Moreover, renewals involve a fee, whereas first-time application is free. This misunderstanding is further exacerbated by the well-intended RENAPER outreach programme of sending mobile offices (trucks) to disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Since these trucks are similar to the RDCs, obtaining the DNI here involves a payment with a debit or credit card. However, since they visit marginalized localities, these trucks have become the primary information point for citizens, which leads many to assume that obtaining the DNI always involves a payment. Furthermore, interviewees mention a lack of general information regarding the application procedure. Several of them believe that they will not be able to obtain the DNI without an intermediary or broker.

Psychological costs

Psychological costs emerge in the treatment of vulnerable citizens by street-level bureaucrats at provincial civil registries. Several interviewees mention bad manners, rudeness and unhelpfulness in their interactions with public officials. Moreover, officials sometimes do not have the correct information about their own procedures. Hence, even when citizens go to the civil registries, their bureaucratic encounters may be far from helpful. Moreover, the bureaucratic encounters can lead to feelings of shame and inadequacy. This may also be the case for procedures that involve presenting an identity document, such as hospital admissions or school enrolment, where people are sometimes looked down upon for not having the DNI. The evidence coming from citizens is confirmed by the IADEPP director, who points out that public servants at civil registries are one of the least professionalized in the country: ‘[In the civil registries, there are] people who don’t know how to provide an answer … and who mistreat you…. What capacity do the beneficiaries have, the problematic population, to understand?’

Compliance costs

Most commonly mentioned in the interviews are the various compliance costs designed into the procedure to obtain the DNI. First, parents must have the original birth certificate to obtain the DNI, as well as for its renewals. If they lose the birth certificate or simply do not have it, they must travel to the provincial civil registry where the birth was registered or should have been registered – even if this means going to the other end of the country. Second, financial costs are mentioned: parents must pay 300 pesos for the enrolment of their child after their first year, as well as for the two mandatory renewals. The only way to pay in cash in the case of late registration is at the RENAPER headquarters in the centre of the city of Buenos Aires, which is an obvious problem for the population living outside the capital and in marginalized communities.³ Finally, several interviewees said that they feel ‘played’ when they tried to obtain their DNIs at the provincial civil registries. They are sometimes sent from one office to the other or are required to present additional information. These compliance costs are even higher for people who do not know how to read or write and receive very little assistance.

AUH: the consequences of exclusion from the DNI

AUH coverage and formal procedure

The AUH covers around 3.6 million children, representing 28% of the Argentinean population under the age of 18. It is a focalized cash transfer but does not depend on means-tested targeting. People qualify for the programme if they are not formally employed (with an income less than the minimum wage) and have children younger than 18 years old that reside in Argentina. Eligibility is determined automatically through government records and verified monthly by the ANSES. The programme has very few administrative entry requirements. As a result, it has a relatively high coverage: 18%, roughly 350,000 people, are identified as eligible but uncovered – a figure that rises to 20% for the section of the target group that lives in extreme poverty (Chudnovsky and Peeters, 2020). One of the few administrative requirements is that both parents and children must have the DNI. An analysis of non-participation in the AUH shows that, besides factors such as lack of time, interest and information, not having the DNI emerges as an important explanation for non-take-up, though exact figures about the number of people excluded for this specific reason are not available (Chudnovsky and Peeters, 2020).

Interviews: the consequences of administrative exclusion

Using the hypotheses developed earlier, Table 2 summarizes the interview findings regarding the consequences of administrative exclusion from the DNI.

Table 2.

Consequences of exclusion from the DNI.

Type of consequence of administrative exclusion	Incidence	Sample quotes
Feedback mechanisms	37 (in 15/16 interviews)	‘[W]hen the procedures become very complex, [people] begin to live their lives without a DNI. Instead of going through all the steps of late registration, they rather decide not to do it at all’ (IADEPP director)‘[W]here there is one person [in a household] without documents, in general, there are several who do not have them’ (ANSES official)
Trickle-down effects	28 (in 5/5 interviews)^a	‘ANSES has strong capacities, but everything else has to work to make ANSES effective’ (ANSES official) ‘[T]he personnel [of the provincial agencies that do the registration by hand] is of very low qualification. It is one of the least qualified in public administration…. In general, they do not have a high-school requirement…. This leads to common problems, such as enrolling the name “Gómez” with an “s” instead of with a “z”, not to mention Eastern European surnames with a “v”, “s”, “k” or “y”’ (IADEPP director)

Note: ^aNo citizen interviews were included in the analysis of trickle-down effects.

Feedback mechanisms: life ‘off the grid’

The consequences of problems regarding the DNI for citizens are severely felt by vulnerable population groups, according to the interviews with the expert and the civil servants. If they never had the DNI or at one point in life lost it, it is very common that they remain living ‘off the grid’. Late registration is perceived as costly and complicated. Moreover, lack of official identification tends to be ‘contagious’: it is not unusual to find an entire family line (grandparents, parents and children) without the DNI. This is confirmed by the interviews with citizens. There is a large variety of reasons for not having the DNI – including losing papers after a divorce, teenagers running away from home, living as a homeless single mom and so on – but almost all interviewees mention that they have somehow learned to survive without an official ID. They are well aware, however, of the consequences this has. Besides not being able to get the AUH benefit, interviewees also mention complications in access to school or health care for their children. This points to a systematic exclusion and marginalization of the most vulnerable population.

Trickle-down mechanisms: administrative capacity and policy inefficiency

According to the interviews with civil servants, limited administrative capacity regarding the DNI indirectly affects the policy efficiency of the AUH. The people at ANSES are aware that the success of the AUH also depends on other elements of the Argentinean state apparatus. In this context, capacity issues in the administration of the DNI are mentioned as a main concern. For instance, a lack of coordination between the information gathered in local hospitals, on the one hand, and provincial civil registries, on the other, complicates the reliability and completeness of civil registration. Capacity issues also emerge at the street level, where enrolment in the AUH is delayed because of limitations in access to the DNI system and a lack of computers to process enrolment, which also causes waiting times for citizens. In short, findings indicate that limitations in the administrative capacity to provide official identity documents trickle down to problems in the implementation of social policies.

Conclusion

A legal ID is the gateway to many public services, rights and benefits. Interestingly, the study of administrative burdens has paid little attention to barriers that citizens face in obtaining an identity document. Despite the approach’s claim that burdens are crucial for citizenship (Moynihan and Herd, 2010), scholarly attention has been ‘most prominent at the intersection of public administration and social policy’ (Moynihan et al., 2015: 47), such as social programmes (Barnes and Henly, 2018), health care and insurance (Moynihan et al., 2016), and welfare benefits (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010). Following the few studies that do study administrative burdens in access to official identity documents and registration (Heinrich, 2018; Nisar, 2018; Peeters and Widlak, 2018), our case studies of administrative exclusion from Argentina’s DNI and from its most important social programme (AUH) presented evidence of: (1) a ‘cascade of exclusion’ from a broad range of social benefits and public services for which documentation and registration are administrative requirements (an exclusion that, moreover, tends to be ‘passed on’ by parents to their children); and (2) a ‘trickle-down effect’ of limitations in the registration and documentation of citizens into the implementation of social policies, which is jeopardized if vulnerable target groups live ‘off the radar’.

These findings contribute to a fuller understanding of the role that administrative burdens play in constructing citizenship. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of analysing administrative burdens as a systemic issue. Burdens are not only policy-specific: while administrative burdens manifest themselves at the basic level of citizen–state interactions, their causes and consequences can only be properly understood if studied in relation to their broader social and administrative context. As the Argentinean case indicates, a context of social inequality and limited administrative capacities may simultaneously increase administrative burdens in access to the state and reduce people’s capacity to overcome them.

The findings presented here have several shortcomings that are mostly a result of the relatively limited number of observations (Onwuegbuzie and Leech, 2007: 235–236): first, the AUH case illustrates only a fraction of the consequences of exclusion from the DNI; second, the effects of administrative exclusion from the DNI on policy efficiency and social marginalization are not directly measured; and, third, the collected data allow for theorizing but are limited in terms of their capacity to test causal inferences. In order to control for the validity of our findings, theoretical sampling, the use of multiple data sources and the description of an ‘audit trail’ (see the online appendix, available at https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/suppl/10.1177/0020852320984541) were used (Onwuegbuzie and Leech, 2007: 235–236). However, future studies can more systematically study the consequences of exclusion from official documentation and registration, and expand the observations to representative population samples and varying population groups (including rural communities), in order to measure the effects of exclusion on social inequality and policy implementation. In terms of practical relevance, our findings indicate the importance of complete, accessible and up-to-date civil registries, official identity documents and other forms of registration as a precondition for transforming formal rights into a tangible reality for citizens. This is especially the case for developing countries, where efforts to include vulnerable citizens in social protection systems are often thwarted by limitations in the state’s capacity to identify and reach the ones that need protection the most.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-ras-10.1177_0020852320984541 - Supplemental material for A cascade of exclusion: administrative burdens and access to citizenship in the case of Argentina’s National Identity Document

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ras-10.1177_0020852320984541 for A cascade of exclusion: administrative burdens and access to citizenship in the case of Argentina’s National Identity Document by Mariana Chudnovsky and Rik Peeters in International Review of Administrative Sciences

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Sergio Campos for his support in preparing the final version of this article.

Dr Mariana Chudnovsky is a research professor of public administration at the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), Mexico. Her research focuses on state capacities, civil services, administrative burdens, and social and health policies in Latin America from a comparative perspective. ORCID iD:

Dr Rik Peeters is a research professor of public administration at the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), Mexico. His main areas of expertise are street-level bureaucracy, administrative burdens, and state–citizen interactions, with a special emphasis on developmental and low-trust contexts. ORCID iD:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9013-6192

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Mariana Chudnovsky

Rik Peeters

Notes

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