Personality as a Mechanism of Inequality in Experiences of Administrative Burdens

Administrative burdens—the learning, compliance, and psychological costs citizens experience when interacting with the state—vary substantially across individuals. Existing research shows that burdens are unequally distributed and shaped by individuals’ social background, their administrative skills, and resource-related pressures such as health problems and financial scarcity. However, we know much less about the psychological foundations of inequality in burdensome experiences. This article examines whether stable personality traits help explain variation in experiences of administrative burden. It argues that two traits in particular—conscientiousness and emotional stability—play a central role in how citizens navigate administrative requirements, given their established links to information processing, task management, and stress regulation. The argument is tested using two pre-registered survey studies from Denmark: a cross sectional survey on tax reporting (n = 1,747) and a vignette experiment involving a fictional elderly care application (n = 1,769). Across both studies, higher levels of conscientiousness and emotional stability are consistently associated with lower learning, compliance, and psychological costs, whereas other personality traits show weaker and less consistent relationships. Additional analyses show that these two traits match or exceed the explanatory power of established predictors such as education, health, and financial scarcity, and account for a non-trivial share of the variation commonly attributed to them. The findings position personality—and particularly conscientiousness and emotional stability—as a central, yet previously overlooked, source of inequality in citizens’ experiences of administrative burden.