Which Clients are Deserving of Help? A Theoretical Model and Experimental Test

Street-level bureaucrats have to cope with high workloads, role conflicts and limited
resources. An important way in which they cope with this is by prioritizing some clients, while
disregarding others. When deciding on whom to prioritize, street-level bureaucrats often
assess whether a client is deserving of help. However, to date the notion of the deserving
client is in a black box as it is largely unclear which client attributes activate the prevailing
social/professional category of deservingness. This article therefore proposes a theoretical
model of three deservingness cues that street-level bureaucrats employ to determine whom
to help: earned deservingness (i.e., the client is deserving because (s)he earned it: “the
hard-working client”), needed deservingness (i.e., the client is deserving because (s)he
needs help: “the needy client”), and resource deservingness (i.e., the client is deserving as
(s)he is probably successful according to bureaucratic success criteria: “the successful
client”). We test the effectiveness of these deservingness cues via an experimental conjoint
design among a nationwide sample of US teachers. Our results suggest that needed
deservingness is the most effective cue in determining which students to help, as teachers
especially intend to prioritize students with low academic performance and members of
minority groups. Earned deservingness was also an effective cue, but to a lesser extent.
Resource deservingness, in contrast, did not affect teachers’ decisions whom to help. The
theoretical and practical implications of our findings for discretionary biases in citizen-state
interactions are discussed.