Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice

Balancing Equity and Equality in Street-Level Bureaucracy: Comparative Perspectives

The Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis invites proposals for a special issue on Balancing Equity and Equality in Street-Level Bureaucracy: Comparative Perspectives. This issue aims to advance our understanding of how street-level bureaucrats, such as social workers, educators, police officers, and healthcare providers, navigate the complex demands of equity and equality in public service delivery across different national, institutional, and policy contexts.

Street-level bureaucrats play a pivotal role in translating policy into practice. While they are often expected to promote social equity by responding to the diverse needs of marginalized populations, they are also tasked with ensuring procedural fairness and equal treatment. This tension between equity (treating people differently to achieve fairness) and equality (treating everyone the same) presents ethical, political, and practical dilemmas. Despite the growing prominence of social equity in public administration research, there remains a critical need for comparative studies that explore how street-level bureaucrats interpret and operationalize these concepts across varying environments.

This special issue seeks to address this gap by encouraging theoretical and empirical contributions that examine the competing demands of equity and equality in street-level work, using comparative approaches to identify patterns, contradictions, and context-specific variations. Contributions may draw on cross-national, cross-sectoral, or intra-organizational comparisons and employ a variety of methodological approaches.

Topics of Interest Include (but are not limited to):

• Comparative analyses of public service values (e.g., equity vs. equality; fairness vs. efficiency).
• Equity and equality in frontline practice across different policy fields (e.g., education, health, welfare, policing).
• Comparative insights from public, private, or third-sector service delivery.
• Differences in how street-level bureaucrats or street-level managers interpret fairness across organizational or cultural settings.
• The role of discretion in advancing or impeding social equity across institutional environments.
• Perceptions of deservingness and their impact on equitable treatment to different types of clients.
• National and/or subnational comparisons of policy environments shaping frontline decision-making.
• Comparative analyses about equity and equality in policy design and policy implementation.

Background and Rationale

This special issue builds on a 2023 international workshop held in Israel that brought together scholars to explore equity and equality at the street level. Discussions from the workshop revealed a strong need for more systematic and comparative inquiry into how SLBs around the world navigate these normative tensions in practice.

We welcome submissions from scholars across disciplines, regions, and career stages.