It's not merely about the content: How rules are communicated matters to administrative burden
通过一项预注册的随机调查实验（N=2243），研究了规则沟通中的信息结构和官僚语言如何影响公民的学习、合规和心理成本，发现即使规则内容相同，沟通方式也会显著改变行政负担。
Abstract Research suggests that citizens often abstain from taking up benefits for which they are eligible because of the costs of learning about how to apply for and the compliance and psychological costs associated with taking up benefits. But to what extent can such burdens be altered simply by changing the way rules are communicated? Bridging literatures on administrative burden, communication theory, and cognitive psychology, we theorize and test the causal impact (using a pre‐registered randomized survey experiment ( N = 2243)) of two prominent aspects of rule communication: information structure and bureaucratic language. Our findings lend support to the expectation that bureaucratic language influences citizens' learning costs as well as their compliance – and to a lesser extent psychological – costs, even when the content of the rules communicated is the same.