Theory Of Representative Bureaucracy Research Articles

MANAJEMEN KONFLIK PAPUA MELALUI PENDEKATAN BIROKRASI PERWAKILAN: Analisis Representasi Deskriptif dan Substantif

This research aims to analyze conflict management in Papua through a representative bureaucracy theory approach which prioritizes descriptive and substantive representation in managing social and political diversity. The prolonged conflict in Papua which is rooted in social injustice, discrimination and marginalization has encouraged feelings of marginalization and demands for independence. Even though the Indonesian government has implemented various policies to reduce conflict, such as granting special autonomy and increasing Papuan representation in the bureaucracy, serious challenges remain. This research uses a qualitative descriptive method with a case study approach to explore this phenomenon in more depth, by collecting data through in-depth interviews, observations and documentation studies related to Papuan policies. The data obtained was analyzed using thematic analysis to identify the main themes related to political representation and government policies in resolving conflicts. The research results show that although there have been significant efforts to achieve more inclusive political representation, the success of these policies is highly dependent on serious implementation that focuses on social justice and transparency. A representative bureaucratic approach, if applied with consistent principles, can make an important contribution to reducing social tensions and creating sustainable peace in Papua.

Race, Lived Experience, Representation, and Discrimination: Analyzing the Representative Capacities of the Racial Majority

The representative bureaucracy theory literature has often focused on the viewpoints, attitudes, and actions of minoritized groups rather than the racial majority, with studies predominately analyzing representative capacities tied to race, ethnicity, and gender. The current research employs both racial and lived experience representation lenses to analyze the viewpoints of non-Hispanic white public servants regarding the deservingness of white, Black, and unidentified clients. Using the opioid crisis as the context, results from an exploratory analysis of a nationwide survey experiment of first responders show that white law enforcement workers view white clients with opioid use disorder as more deserving than Black and unidentified clients. Both indirect and direct lived experiences with substance use disorder predict positive attitudes toward clients. Direct lived experience nullifies the negative beliefs white law enforcement workers express about Black clients, highlighting the significance of the intersection of racial and lived experience representation. Practical implications include promoting organizational practices that leverage the strength of shared lived experience to mitigate racial biases and encourage compassion for clients.

Transit Board Diversity and Pandemic Service Cuts in Vulnerable Communities

Despite its primary role in shaping policy and service characteristics, board governance is an understudied topic in the field of urban transit. Existing research on board management and representative bureaucracy theory suggests that the race and gender diversity of boards has a significant impact on organizational activity but that these relationships are highly dependent on the cultural context and industry analyzed. In this paper, we evaluate how the diversity of transit boards (with respect to race, gender, and disability) in the U.S.A. correlates with service changes authorized by these boards during the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing a database on board governance and general transit feed specification data for 36 agencies, we find a positive relationship between the presence of women on transit boards and vertically equitable service cuts, defined as increasing or maintaining transit service in more vulnerable neighborhoods. Overall, transit agencies with more female board members had more equitable service cuts, on average, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Towards a theory of representative bureaucracy in schooling

Abstract This introduction to the special issue of Multicultural Learning and Teaching—written by the issue’s guest editor—frames the topic of diversifying the educator workforce using the concept of representative bureaucracy. The introduction grounds readers in the history of this highly politicized issue and offers a framework for engaging with the work. The introduction also situates the journal issue’s subsequent articles within this context.

Assessing the impact of women’s underrepresentation on public service delivery in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT In the wake of the political upheaval witnessed in Afghanistan in August 2021, there has been a noticeable curtailment of women’s involvement in the public sector. This quantitative cross-sectional study, grounded in representative bureaucracy theory, examines the perceived effects of this underrepresentation through a diverse and representative sample of 349 employees from various government departments. Employing a 21-item questionnaire with 5-point Likert scales, the survey assessed service accessibility, quality, responsiveness, accountability, and innovation dimensions. Snowball sampling was utilized due to access limitations post-August 2021, with a minimum one-year work experience as the inclusion criterion. Data analysis involved descriptive statistics, index creation for service dimensions, correlation analysis, and ANOVA to examine differences based on participant characteristics like grade, education, and age. The findings indicate that the lack of female representation significantly impairs service delivery across dimensions like accessibility, quality, innovation, and accountability, particularly concerning women. The study underscores the detrimental consequences of gender homogeneity on formulating gender-sensitive policies and maintaining inclusive, high-quality public services. These results emphasize the necessity of promoting gender diversity within the Afghan public sector to ensure responsive and equitable service delivery aligning with the needs of all societal segments.

Religion and representative bureaucracy: Does religion guide administrative discretion?

In this paper we seek to understand how religion influences discretion in a developing fragile society: Palestine. Drawing on a recent review of the religion and public administration literature and the theory of representative bureaucracy, we ask: Does active representation on behalf of a religious identity exist? And if so, what does it look like? We explore four different possible manifestations, including none at all. In other words, this is a study of how religiosity influences civil servant behaviour in instances of discretion. Using original small-n in-person survey data, we find active representation by a majority of mid-level civil servants on behalf of a religious identity; we find evidence of religious service being underpinned by public service motivation and by pro-social motivation. Others are guided by traditional Weberian bureaucratic values while others are guided by what they perceive to be the religious foundation of the bureaucracy.

Examining community policing policy implementation and racial disparities in officer-involved lethal encounters

PurposeThe goal of this study is to examine how community policing policies (CPP) can be effective in addressing racial disparities in police killings in the United States.Design/methodology/approachThe study utilized multi-level mixed modeling techniques.FindingsThe study finds that CPP training for in-service officers is effective when the police chief is black, in contrast to the presence of written CPP statements and CPP training for newly recruited officers. This article concludes that the effectiveness of policy implementation is dependent upon policing leaders who manage policy implementation.Research limitations/implicationsThis research is limited in that it only includes data from people who were killed by police. In addition, it was extremely difficult to collect data on the race of the officer. Hence, it reduced the number of viable cases that we could include in the analysis.Practical implicationsThe most significant practical limitation to our research is the ability to generalize to police departments within a city and between cities. In some cases, police killings were confined to one or two areas in a city.Social implicationsDisproportionality in police killings is important in every country where certain groups are overrepresented in the number of police killings. This is particularly true today, where we see groups like Black Lives Matter highlighting higher levels of lethal force in minority neighborhoods.Originality/valueUsing representative bureaucracy theory, this research shows leaders select and emphasize specific goals among a set of organizational goals, seek to build trust rather than fight crimes and support goals to improve policy outcomes, which fills a theoretical gap in the theory.

Displacing the burden of representation: Engaging with critical Whiteness to expand the theory of representative bureaucracy

The theory of representative bureaucracy has provided an important yet limited framework for understanding exclusion in the public sector. This theoretical paper engages with critical approaches to argue for an expanded theory that centers social equity. Close attention to the relationship between the public and nonprofit sectors illuminates how public institutions protect and reproduce White, masculine space by shifting the burden of representation onto racially minoritized public administrators and community-based nonprofit organizations led by and for people of color. An expanded theory will (1) advance an understanding of both sectors as institutional spaces that protect Whiteness and impede full representation and (2) recognize the importance of the labor required to counter inequities and actively represent minoritized constituents.

Officer diversity may reduce Black Americans’ fear of the police

AbstractWould police racial and gender diversification reduce Black Americans’ fear of the police? The theory of representative bureaucracy indicates that it might. We tested the effects of officer diversity in two experiments embedded in a national survey that oversampled Black Americans, producing several findings. First, in early 2022, nearly 2 years after George Floyd's killing, most Black Americans remained afraid of police mistreatment. Second, in a conjoint experiment in which respondents were presented with 11,000 officer profiles, Black Americans were less afraid when the officers were non‐White (Black or Hispanic/Latino) instead of White and when they were female instead of male. Third, in a separate experiment with pictured police teams, Black Americans were less afraid of being mistreated by non‐White and female officers. Fourth, experimental evidence emerged that body‐worn cameras (BWCs) reduced fear among both Black and non‐Black respondents. These findings support calls to diversify police agencies and to require officers to wear and notify civilians of BWC.

Bureaucratic Beliefs and Representation: Linking Social Identities, Attitudes, and Client Outcomes

Representative bureaucracy theory posits that the demographic makeup of a bureaucracy can affect how policy is implemented, especially when bureaucrats engage in “active representation” or behavior that directly advances the interests of a particular group in society. It is often assumed that active representation is motivated by the unique beliefs, convictions, or affinities experienced by bureaucrats holding particular social identities. But few studies of representative bureaucracy have attempted to directly measure the attitudes of bureaucrats, and even fewer studies examine whether such attitudes are meaningfully linked to policy outcomes. This study examines the social identities, self-perceived roles, and political preferences of local school administrators in Texas. The results confirm a link between bureaucratic managers’ social identities and distributional policy outcomes, while also suggesting that distinctive bureaucratic attitudes (as observed here) can offer at best a partial explanation for why the social identities of bureaucrats are linked to policy outcomes.

The Association between the Percentage of Female Law Enforcement Officers and Rape Report, Clearance, and Arrest Rates: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of California.

Rape is an underreported violent crime that frequently remains uncleared (open) in the legal system. Rape disproportionately affects women, with 91% of rape victim-survivors estimated to be female. However, law enforcement agencies, the entry point into the criminal justice system, are predominantly comprised of male officers. According to the theory of representative bureaucracy, groups with greater representation in a bureaucratic system are more likely to have their interests protected. This study aims to determine if California law enforcement agencies with a higher percentage of female officers are more likely to have higher rates of rape reporting, clearances, and arrests. No previous study has examined this relationship using statewide data. Crimes and Clearances, Monthly Arrest and Citation Register, and Uniform Crime Reporting data for California (2013-2016) were aggregated into 499 Law Enforcement Reporting Areas (LERA). Bayesian space-time Poisson regressions controlling for LERA demographics and crime produced scaled relative rates for three outcomes: (a) rape report rate: number of reports relative to population ages 18+; (b) rape clearance rate: number of clearances relative to reports; and (c) rape arrest rate: number of arrests for rape relative to reports. A 5% increase in the percentage of female officers within an agency was associated with a 6.2% increase in the rape report rate (ARR: 1.062, 95% credible interval (CI) [1.048, 1.077]), a 2.9% decrease in the clearance rate (ARR: 0.971 95% CI [0.950, 0.993]), and no change in the rape arrest rates (ARR: 1.010; 95% CI [0.981, 1.039]) across all LERA. Thus, increased female officer representation was associated with an increase in rape reporting rates but associated with a decrease in rape clearance rates. The theory of representative bureaucracy was only partially supported, and these relationships may not be causal. The quantity of rape reports received by an agency, employment and promotion practices of agencies, and victim-survivor's attitudes toward officer's gender should also be considered.

The Effectiveness of the Federal Character Principle in Enugu, Kogi State and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Public Service

Purpose: The study seeks to understand the extent to which the Federal Character Principle ensured even representation of Federal Public Servants in Enugu State, Kogi State and the Federal Capital Territory. Also, to know if the federal character principle is faced with some challenges in Enugu State, Kogi State and the Federal Capital Territory and understand the advantages and prospects of the federal character principle to the Federal Public Service in Enugu State, Kogi State and the Federal Capital Territory. Theoretical Framework: This study is situated within the Theory of Representative Bureaucracy propounded by Bola Dauda (2000). This theory was propounded to solve crisis in the Public Service Recruitment in order to ensure administrative and political harmony especially for the third world countries. Design/Methodology/Approach: The design of the study is descriptive and survey research design. Primary method of data collection was employed. One hundred and fifty - five (164) questionnaires were administered to one hundred and fifty – five (155) respondents and questionnaires were responded to, and recovered. For the purpose of this study, Federal Character Commission in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Kogi and Enugu states were sampled. Findings: The findings of this study shows that the extent to which the federal character principle has ensured even representation of every region of Nigeria in the federal civil service is low. It was revealed by the findings of this study that the problems of regional domination and fear of minorities of marginalization in the federal public service have not been largely tackled by the federal character principle in Nigeria. Also, the Federal Character Principle is characterized by some obvious problems which include sacrificing competence and merit on the altar of fair regional representation; the federal character principle being an opportunity for those in power to favour people from their regions and the emphasis the Federal Character Principle places on difference rather than integration. Conclusion: The federal character principle is one those principles which Nigeria has adopted in her attempt to balance the national life of her diverse heritage. There seem to be nothing wrong with the federal character principle and its adoption into the Nigerian state but so much seem to be wrong in the application of this principle in Nigeria due to administrative lapses on the part of the Federal Character Commission and selfish interests on the part of those in power.

Representative bureaucracy and family planning service delivery in Tanzania

AbstractWe apply the theory of representative bureaucracy to examine if gender congruence between family planning care providers and service recipients correlates with communication behaviors during consultation. We use nationally representative administrative data from Tanzania's Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). We apply a series of logistic and ordered logistic regression analyses and find that gender congruence is correlated with both family planning service recipients' and care providers' communication behaviors. Despite confirming the principal tenets of the theory of representative bureaucracy, we also document mixed results when considering the moderating effects of service recipients' prior experience with service on communication behaviors. Taken together, representation has a positive effect on female providers' communication behavior. Yet, for service recipients, its benefits are contingent upon the type of outcome assessed and prior experience with service. We discuss the policy and practical implications of our study in the context of the benefits and limits of representation.

Race in Representative Bureaucracy Theory: A Problematizing Review

Race in Representative Bureaucracy Theory: A Problematizing Review

Representative bureaucracy and organizational attractiveness: An experimental study of symbolic representation of the US and UK police

AbstractDrawing upon representative bureaucracy theory, this study investigates the relationship between passive and symbolic representation by examining the extent to which a more passively representative public organization would be attractive as an employer. The study involved a randomized survey experiment of members of the public in the US and UK. Overall, and contrary to the theory of representative bureaucracy, results show that women found a male‐dominated police department more attractive. The explanation for the results of the study may lie in bureaucratic reputation as a boundary condition of symbolic representation.

Race in representative bureaucracy theory: A problematizing review

AbstractThis study is an epistemic reflexive examination of race in representative bureaucracy theory, responding to the criticism that its conceptualization has been narrow. To counter socially reinforced ways of thinking, we use a problematizing review method to read broadly and selectively. Reviewing a sample of articles published in public administration (immediate research domain); political science (neighboring domain); sociology and Asian/cultural/ethnic studies (indirectly relevant domains) between 2017 and 2021 and paying attention to social constructionism, we examined how race and ethnicity are conceptualized. While the articles in public administration focused on a binary conception of race, treating differential outcomes as natural, articles sampled from other domains explained how ethnoracial categories were constructed, highlighted the contextual nature of differential outcomes, and engaged with the issue of racialization. To expand the conception of race in public administration, we must explore the process in which racial constructs became associated with unequal outcomes.

Gender Representation and Females’ Performance: The Role of Discretion Between Stakeholders

The representative bureaucracy theory highlights the role of demographic characteristics in improving the benefits of the interests of clients who share similar values and experiences. Using data of 4-year universities and qualitative interviews in Korea, this study investigates how gender representation of stakeholder groups influences the multiple dimensions of females’ performances and whether the variations of discretion for stakeholders matter. The findings of this study demonstrate that increasing female board members, faculty, and staff is positively associated with female students’ graduation outcomes. However, having more female students is negatively associated with female faculty’s research outcomes. Moreover, the impacts of discretion between stakeholder groups and within faculty group matter for female students’ outcomes.

Representative Bureaucracy and Perceptions of Social Exclusion in Europe: Evidence From 27 Countries

Representative bureaucracy theory predicts that mirroring social groups in the composition of the bureaucracy will lead to inclusive policies and less overall exclusion of diverse individuals. While supporting evidence on policy outcomes is abundant, findings on subjective perceptions are mixed. This study tests three hypotheses linking representative bureaucracy to perceived same-group discrimination in the general population. It introduces a novel multidimensional index of bureaucratic underrepresentation, and uses mixed effects hierarchical models to approximate answers. Exploratory findings suggest an “ awareness” mechanism may explain the counterintuitive relationship between underrepresentation and feelings of exclusion, in which more diverse public sectors develop alongside higher awareness of discrimination.

Race, Locality, and Representative Bureaucracy: Does Community Bias Matter?

Abstract Despite burgeoning research on representative bureaucracy theory, there is limited examination of how environmental contexts shape the manner in which the demographic makeup of a bureaucracy is linked to distributional bureaucratic outcomes. Scholars in the field of social psychology, however, have suggested that community-level variation in the pervasiveness of biases against particular social groups helps to explain inequitable outcomes in such diverse settings as education, policing, and health care. Incorporating social psychology research into representative bureaucracy theory, this article examines how community racial biases shape the association between the demographic makeup of an organization’s personnel and its bureaucratic outcomes. Using county-level implicit and explicit bias measures that are estimated by multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) based on a dataset containing more than 1.2 million respondents, we find that more inequitable educational outcomes occur for black students in counties where white residents hold stronger anti-black biases. Our findings also suggest that while black teachers are associated with more favorable outcomes for black students in the zero-sum context of assignment to gifted classes, the association of outcomes with passive representation is more limited in counties with strong racial biases. By accounting for the racial biases exhibited in the communities where both clients and bureaucrats are socially and culturally embedded, this article extends our understanding of how contextual factors shape the nature of bureaucratic representation.

Climbing the Velvet Drainpipe: Class Background and Career Progression within the UK Civil Service

Abstract Although the theory of representative bureaucracy originates from concerns about the class composition of the public sector workforce, questions of class background have been notably absent in subsequent scholarship. In this article, I take advantage of new data on the class backgrounds of UK civil servants (N = 308, 566) to, first, explore descriptively how class shapes the composition of the civil service, both vertically in terms of occupational grade and horizontally in terms of department, location, and profession. I show that those from working-class backgrounds are not only under-represented in the Civil Service as a whole but also this skew is particularly acute in propulsive departments like the Treasury, locations like London and in the Senior Civil Service. This initial descriptive analysis then acts as the staging point for the central qualitative component of my analysis, drawing on 104 in-depth interviews across 4 case-study departments. Here, I identify three unwritten rules of career progression that tend to act as barriers for those from working-class backgrounds; access to accelerator jobs; organizational ambiguity in promotion processes; and sorting into operational (versus policy) tracks that have progression bottlenecks. This analysis highlights the need for more work on class representation, as well as underlining how representative bureaucracy may be impeded by patterns of horizontal as well as vertical segregation, particularly in work areas that have an outsized influence on policy design.