Administrative Overload and Street-Level Bureaucracy: Consequences for Citizen-Facing Services

What happens to citizen–state interactions when administrative demand outpaces administrative capacity? While scholars increasingly diagnose implementation deficits, triage, and backlogs as symptoms of administrative overload, evidence on how overload reshapes street-level encounters remains fragmented. This article provides a systematic account of overload and its consequences across core citizen-facing organizations, including citizen offices, building and vehicle authorities, and immigration, welfare and youth offices. We analyze coping on two levels: organizational strategies (e.g., triage arrangements, training, and digitalization) and individual street-level responses (e.g., creaming, overtime, and personal investments of time and resources). Conceptually, we distinguish coping that moves toward clients from coping that moves away from them, allowing us to theorize how overload can simultaneously erode service quality and generate adaptive innovations. Using a large-N survey of public agencies in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, we show that overload varies systematically across agency types and territorial contexts and is associated with distinct coping profiles. These findings clarify how administrative strain reconfigures bureaucratic discretion in practice and helps explain variation in the accessibility, responsiveness, and fairness of citizen-facing public services.