Testing Roma Discrimination in Street-Level Bureaucracy: A Telephone Audit of Municipal Social Services

Abstract

The article aims to assess how the telephone audit method aligns with the theoretical approach of street-level bureaucracy and what possibilities and limitations it offers in investigating potential indirect discrimination against Roma in the field of municipal social services. The empirical study is based on a mixed methodological approach. A telephone audit was conducted, during which a request for urgent social assistance was submitted on behalf of a Roma woman using to a standardized scenario. A total of 31 calls were made to 18 Lithuanian municipal administrations and social service administration units. The audit data were supplemented by interviews with four Roma mediators and one Roma NGO representative. Since there was no control condition in the study, the results do not allow for a causal isolation of the effect of ethnic identity from other possible factors. In summary, it can be stated that the telephone audit is a suitable, but not an independent, tool for investigating mechanisms of indirect discrimination in the context of close bureaucracy. It allows for the description of verification behavior under real conditions, which declarative methods certainly failed to achieve, but the identification conditions that are established based on ethnic discrimination must be controlled. The current study has revealed the limitations of the application of experimental auditing. This method reliably records how an employee responded to a standardized decision but does not in itself explain why a particular decision was chosen.