Administrative decisions mediate whether the millions who turn to the state for social services annually can access the assistance they need. We introduce the concept of intersectional burdens—which describes how a person’s social location (including race, class, gender, age, and ability) shapes their access and use of state benefits and programs—to account for the ways mutually reinforcing systems structure experiences with the state and to better understand how inequalities are experienced, reproduced, and resisted. We illustrate the intersectional nature of associated costs by drawing on a random stratified sample of sixty-one Black, Latinx, and White women’s experiences from the American Voices Project. We find that individuals who seek public safety net assistance do not experience administrative burdens in the same way or to the same degree and that social location substantively affects how people navigate administrative burdens in public income assistance processes, health-care systems, and housing experiences.
Authors
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.4.04
- ISBN
- 2377-8253 2377-8261
- Pages
- 19
- Published in
- United States of America
- Rights
- © 2024 Russell Sage Foundation. Rocha Beardall, Theresa, Collin Mueller, and Tony Cheng. 2024. “Intersectional Burdens: How Social Location Shapes Interactions with the Administrative State.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10(4): 84–102. https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.4.04. We thank the American Voices Project leadership, research, and staff team for collecting the data for this article. We are grateful to the graduate students at the University of Maryland for their research assistance and acknowledge funding support from the Maryland Population Research Center and College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland. Thank you to the Russell Sage Foundation and the anonymous reviewers of this article. We are also grateful to the women who shared their experiences and stories throughout the pandemic. Direct correspondence to: Theresa Rocha Beardall, at tyrb@uw.edu, University of Washington, Department of Sociology