Overburdened Bureaucrats: Providing Equal Access to Public Services During COVID-19

Discriminatory treatment of minorities by bureaucrats remains a serious challenge. A dominant explanation argues that bureaucrats discriminate because of high workloads in public organizations, but few empirical studies test this outside the lab. In this study, I investigate whether workload matters for discrimination in a real-world public service context during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark in 2020. I document that unemployment services experienced a substantial increase in workload due to a 20% rise in unemployment and exploit the fact that the increase happened suddenly and spread asymmetrically. I use microlevel register data on bureaucrat–client interactions on more than 380,000 unemployed and examine whether bureaucrats provided fewer services to citizens of non-Western descent. The finding reveals that the substantial workload associated with the COVID-19 pandemic did not lead to increased discrimination. I discuss the special circumstances associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the possible role of professional norms and access to information.