Intersectional Burdens: How Social Location Shapes Interactions with the Administrative State

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.