Professors Einstein and Glick Publish on Race and Public Housing in AJPS
Assistant Professors Katherine Einstein and David Glick recently published an article about race and access to information about public housing in the American Journal of Political Science. The article, titled “Does Race Affect Access to Government Services? An Experiment Exploring Street-Level Bureaucrats and Access to Public Housing” using an field experiment / audit design to test local officials’ responsiveness to racially distinctive names in requests for government services. In a relatively optimistic finding, compared to others’ findings of discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in other contexts, the authors found that officials were equally responsive irrespective of race. They also found, less optimistically, that Hispanics (but not blacks) receive less polite/formal responses and that the outlook for anyone seeking public housing is bleak because of scarcity.