Organizational Deservingness and Street-Level Prioritization: Why Resource-Based Cues Outweigh Effort and Need in Administrative Service Delivery

Street-level bureaucrats in many political systems work under chronic overload: demand for services exceeds time and staff, while performance targets and political expectations continue to expand. In this context, frontline officials must routinely decide not only how to process cases, but whose cases to process first. Existing research on such triage focuses largely on individual citizens and emphasizes deservingness judgments based on effort and need. We know much less about how street-level bureaucrats prioritize organizational clients when capacity is limited, and how these prioritization choices are shaped by higher-level organizational goals. This paper develops the concept of organizational deservingness and links it to embedded discretion in a setting of persistent administrative overload. We argue that organizations, like individuals, can be evaluated along three dimensions: earned deservingness (effort and cooperation with administrative procedures), needed deservingness (urgency and necessity of public help), and resource deservingness (expected performance payoffs such as tax revenue). However, in overburdened bureaucracies, these criteria are filtered through organizational priorities and performance regimes. Street-level bureaucrats are not just moral evaluators; they are agents embedded in organizations that emphasize economic growth, fiscal capacity, and quantitative targets. Empirically, we study frontline police officers in a mid-sized Chinese city who process residence permits for firms’ migrant workers. This task is both administratively demanding and politically salient, affecting workers’ access to social services and firms’ ability to legally employ labor, while police units simultaneously face tight quotas, multiple tasks, and expectations to “support the local economy.”