Representative Bureaucracy and Decentralization: A Preliminary Cross-National Study

Abstract

This is perhaps the first study to explore the gender-representativeness of bureaucracies cross-nationally. Using the percentage of female civil servants at the central government and sub-national levels as its dependent variables, this study finds that fiscal decentralization shows a negative and statistically significant relationship at the central government level while the percentage of female parliamentarians is negatively related to the percentage of female civil servants at the sub-national level. A country's gender development index and voice and accountability index are also positively and statistically significant for both models. The tentative implication is that the structural decentralization of government is an insufficient guarantor of the passive representation of women within the civil services and instead, it is the devolution of fiscal authority and certain socioeconomic characteristics of society that matter most for representative bureaucracies. Unable to evaluate active representation due to data limitations, this paper encourages further data collection and case study work to clarify these preliminary conclusions. The primary empirical objective of this paper is to discover if there is a causal link between the gender representativeness of the civil service and decentralization. The second objective is to evaluate the empirical results to suggest the policy implications of the findings. The third objective will consider where greater data collection and an expanded methodological approach might provide more nuanced analysis. The final objective is to show the need for avenues of increased communication among political scientists, economists, public administration scholars, and more generally, international development scholars and practitioners.