Latin American Research Review 591 In recent years, the Dominican Republic has retroactively stripped Dominican citizenship from tens of thousands of Dominican-born people of Haitian descent.1 By any standard, denationalization constitutes a flagrant violation of human rights. Notably, however, when advocacy groups and Latin American legal institutions rose up in reaction to the assault on citizenship represented by Constitutional Court judgment TC 168-13 (La Sentencia), Dominican government officials neither backed down decisively nor overtly defied them. Instead, they deftly navigated the situation to preserve the essence of exclusion while conceding just enough to move the case off the front-page news. The policies put forth in a subsequent law (169-14) appear to offer a pathway for people to reinstate their citizenship but are in fact so administratively onerous that much of the affected population has been left effectively stateless. This case is concerning for what it implies about compliance with international human rights norms and for the practical outcome it has produced: the largest population of stateless people in the Western hemisphere. “Administrative obstructionism” describes a contemporary strategy in which countries accomplish goals considered illegitimate by the international community in ways that limit criticism. The global trend of democratic backsliding exemplifies this strategy (Haggard and Kaufman 2021). Compared to more blatant methods of violating democracy, such as military coups and outright electoral fraud, governments are enacting measures like stiffening requirements for opposition party candidates and incrementally weakening institutional checks and balances. “On its own, each step can appear relatively inconsequential. Yet the outcomes add up” (Lindberg 2018). Eroding democracy rather than attacking it head-on creates a more complicated target. Administrative obstructionism draws on the concept “administrative burden,” conceived to explain gaps in the uptake of US welfare policies (Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey 2014; Herd and Moynihan 2018). An alternative to overt policy making, administrative burdening refers to the costs—in learning, compliance, and psychological stress—that governments make citizens endure to gain access to public programs they are legally entitled to receive. Learning costs include acquiring information about programs, determining one’s eligibility, and figuring out how to apply. Compliance costs refer to time and money required to prove eligibility, complete forms, and satisfy other necessary transactions. Psychological costs, including frustration and feeling powerless, deter citizens from even applying to programs or wear them down before they succeed. An insidious aspect of administrative burdening is that rules couched in neutral language affect given populations differently. Their disparate impact tends to map onto broader patterns of socioeconomic inequality. Low levels of education and income render costs harder to pay (Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey 2014, 63). Administrative obstructionism often includes “blame avoidance” (Weaver 1986), whereby rights-depriving officials deflect responsibility to other government agencies. Even if top elected officials appoint the heads of these agencies, the agencies provide political cover for poor policy implementation. Diffusing responsibility and scapegoating bureaucrats for complicating what are presented as otherwise decent policies constitute common examples of blame avoidance. This dynamic, coupled with the excessive costs placed on citizens, delays the resolution of human rights issues and induces media attention to recede over time. The Dominican Republic is not the only country that has threatened the citizenship of nationals and sought to redefine the polity through less-than-transparent bureaucratic means, including by demanding citizenship-proving documents of those unlikely to have them. The ultimate aim in studying this single case is to identify causal mechanisms and processes that shed light on other cases (Gerring 2004). As the global rise of nationalism 1 This article uses the terms Dominico-Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent or ancestry to describe Dominican-born people of Haitian ancestry. Other terms risk conflating Haitian descendants with Haitian nationals, a common practice that stems from widespread anti-Haitian sentiment. https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2022.48 Published online by Cambridge University Press