High COVID Workloads Did Not Raise Bureaucratic Discrimination in Denmark

Why This Study Matters

Public-sector discrimination against minority clients is a persistent concern for equity in service delivery. Karoline Larsen Kolstad asks whether sudden increases in bureaucratic workload—like those caused by the COVID-19 shock—make frontline staff more likely to treat minority clients differently. The question tests a common theory: when public organizations are overwhelmed, discretionary decisions may become more biased.

What Karoline Larsen Kolstad Did

The study leverages the early 2020 COVID-19 surge in Denmark as a real-world test of workload-driven discrimination. A roughly 20% rise in unemployment created a sudden and uneven workload increase across unemployment offices. That asymmetric timing provides plausibly exogenous variation in bureaucratic strain that can be used to see whether heavier caseloads changed how staff treated clients.

Data and Research Design

• Uses microlevel register data on bureaucrat–client interactions covering more than 380,000 unemployed claimants in Denmark during 2020.
• Exploits the sudden, spatially and temporally varying increase in caseloads across offices as a natural experiment to compare service provision under higher versus lower workload conditions.
• Focuses on differential treatment of citizens of non‑Western descent as the test for discriminatory outcomes.

Key Findings

• Despite a substantial increase in workload associated with COVID-19, there is no evidence that bureaucrats provided fewer services to citizens of non‑Western descent.
• The results cast doubt on a straightforward link between short-term overload and increased frontline discrimination in this public-service context.

Why It Matters for Policy and Research

The findings suggest that organizational context, professional norms, and information systems can buffer public services against short-term shocks that might otherwise enable biased behavior. Kolstad discusses how the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic and institutional features of Danish unemployment services may have preserved equitable treatment. The study encourages scholars and policymakers to look beyond workload as the sole driver of bureaucratic discrimination and to investigate the institutional mechanisms that sustain fairness under stress.