Replication Data for: Does Race Affect Access to Government Services? An Experiment Exploring Street-Level Bureaucrats and Access to Public Housing

While experimental studies of local election officials have found evidence of racial discrimination, we know little about whether these biases manifest in bureaucracies that provide access to valuable government programs and are less tied to politics. We address these issues in the context of affordable housing programs using a randomized field experiment. We explore responsiveness to putative white, black, and Hispanic requests for aid in the housing application process. In contrast to prior findings, public housing officials respond at equal rates to black and white email requests. We do, however, find limited evidence of responsiveness discrimination towards Hispanics. Moreover, we observe substantial differences in email tone. Hispanic housing applicants were twenty percentage points less likely to be greeted by name than were their black and white counterparts. This disparity in tone is somewhat more muted in more diverse locations, but it does not depend on whether a housing official is Hispanic.

尽管针对地方选举工作人员的实验研究已证实种族歧视的存在，但我们仍不清楚此类偏见是否会出现在那些提供优质政府福利、且与政治关联度较低的行政机构中。本研究以保障性住房项目为研究场景，通过随机实地实验对上述问题展开探讨。我们研究了住房申请流程中，针对模拟白人、黑人和西班牙裔身份的援助请求的响应情况。与既往研究结论不同的是，公共住房官员对黑人和白人的邮件求助请求的响应率并无显著差异。不过，我们仅发现少量针对西班牙裔的响应歧视证据。此外，我们还观察到邮件语气存在显著差异：西班牙裔住房申请者被以姓名问候的概率，较黑人和白人申请者低20个百分点。这种语气上的差异在种族更多元的地区会有所缓和，但与住房官员自身是否为西班牙裔并无关联。