Ambition Is Priceless

Abstract

Within the representative bureaucracy literature, there are a variety of individual or professional incentives that may discourage movement from passive to active representation. This study presents two of these incentives by explaining the potential effects of professional socialization and individual career ambition. Using 3 years of survey and performance data from public schools, this research explores how professional socialization and ambitions of career advancement may promote specific behaviors that potentially support or discourage effective representation. The results indicate that professional socialization actually promotes representation by African American and Latino bureaucrats. The impact of Latino representation across values of professional socialization is also significantly different from that of White managers. The results also demonstrate varying effects for bureaucratic career ambition, as the effect of Latino administrators on student performance is minimized for administrators with higher levels of ambition. For African American administrators, the opposite is true as Black administrators with high levels of ambition are related to increasingly positive student performance. These results add to our understanding of representative bureaucracy by exploring how different values will interact with a minority bureaucrat’s decision to represent the interests of minority clients.