Do Competitive Examinations Promote Diversity in Civil Service?

• Published date: 01 May 2019
• Author: Yannick L'Horty,Guillaume Pierné,Mathieu Narcy,Joseph Lanfranchi,Nathalie Greenan
• Date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13053

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 3, pp. 370–382. © 2019 The

Authors. Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13053. The copyright

line for this article was changed on 21 May

2019 after original online publication.

370 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

and is not used for commercial purposes.

Abstract: The representative bureaucracy literature provides a growing body of empirical evidence that a

representative public workforce enhances the efficacy and legitimacy of public services. However, little attention

has been paid to the capacity of civil service competitive examinations to give equal opportunity of access to public

jobs to equally competent citizens. To fill this gap, the authors use French databases to analyze whether competitive

examinations comprising both written and oral tests ensure equality of treatment for all candidates regardless of gender,

place of residence, or place of birth. The results challenge the capacity of these examinations to treat candidates equally,

identifying inequalities in the written tests as well as evaluation biases in the oral tests. However, oral evaluation biases

tend to offset inequalities in the written tests. Therefore, selection boards take a sort of affirmative action toward the

sole successful members of groups suffering such inequalities.

Evidence for Practice

• Little is known about the capacity of civil service competitive examinations to provide equal opportunity of

access to public jobs for equally competent citizens.

• Although written tests preserve candidates’ anonymity, they are not free of adverse impacts against women

and candidates coming from deprived areas or born abroad.

• Oral tests (which follow the written ones) offer selection boards the opportunity to partially compensate for

inequalities stemming from written tests, with the objective to better integrate all components of society into

the civil service.

• The challenge for public managers wanting to promote diversity alongside proficiency is to reduce the scale

of inequalities in the written tests while preserving the ability to select the best candidates.

Nathalie Greenan

Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris

Joseph Lanfranchi

Université Paris 2, Panthéon-Assas

Yannick L’Horty

Université Paris-Est

Mathieu Narcy

Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris

Guillaume Pierné

Université d’Angers

Do Competitive Examinations Promote Diversity in

Civil Service?

The theory of representative bureaucracy

suggests that a public workforce should reflect

the composition of the general population

in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and family social

class in order to improve the efficacy and legitimacy

of public services. Mosher (1982) distinguishes two

types of representation: Passive representation refers to

the degree to which the members of the bureaucracy

mirror the society as a whole. Active representation

assumes that public bureaucrats act, consciously or

unconsciously, for the interests and desires of those

who share their demographic and social background.

Hence, active representation helps policy outcomes

reflect the interests of all groups represented in

society, including minorities. In general, the theory

of representative bureaucracy holds that passive

representation tends to lead to active representation.

Nevertheless, recent research has shown that passive

representation, through its symbolic importance,

can enhance trust in public organizations and

produce a greater willingness on the part of citizens

to coproduce, regardless of bureaucratic actions

(Riccucci, Van Ryzin, and Li 2016; Theobald and

Haider-Markel 2009).

The aim of this article is to analyze the capacity of

civil service competitive examinations to provide

equal opportunity of access to public jobs for

equally competent citizens and to protect against

discrimination. In fact, very little attention has been

paid to the best system of recruitment to achieve

bureaucratic representation, even though a wide range

of empirical evidence supports the positive effects of a

representative public workforce.

Numerous empirical studies have demonstrated

a positive relationship between the proportion of

minorities in decision- making roles and policy

outcomes compatible with the interests of those

minorities, without distinguishing the effects of passive

and active representations (Bradbury and Kellough

2011; Nicholson- Crotty et al. 2016). For example, Dee

(2005) finds that public school students from minority

groups perform better when they are in classrooms

Mathieu Narcy is associate professor of

economics in the Conservatoire National des

Arts et Métiers in Paris. He is also member of the

Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Research in Action

Science (LIRSA) and the Centre for Labor and

Employment Studies (CEET). His main research area

is labor economics, with a special interest in the

study of differences in gender inequalities, prosocial

motivation, and incentives between nonprofit, public,

and for-profit organizations.

E-mail: mathieu.narcy@lecnam.net

Yannick L’Horty is professor at Université

Paris-Est and director of the research federation on

Work, Employment, and Public Policies (National

Centre for Scientific Research), which consists of 10

research units and 200 researchers. His main research

areas are labor economics, urban economics, and

the evaluation of public policies. He is author of 250

publications.

E-mail: yannick.lhorty@u-pem.fr

Joseph Lanfranchi is associate professor of

economics at Université Paris 2, Panthéon-Assas

and a member of the Laboratory of mathematical

economics and applied microeconomics (LEMMA).

His research focuses on economics of personnel

and human resource management, with a special

interest in the comparison of workplace practices

and motivation and performance of employees in

the public, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors.

E-mail: joseph.lanfranchi@u- paris2.fr

Nathalie Greenan is professor of economics

in the Conservatoire National des Arts et

Métiers (CNAM) in Paris and a member of

the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Research in

Action Science (LIRSA). She leads the research

programs on “Organisational Changes, Work

and Employment” in CNAM’s Centre for Labor

and Employment Studies (CEET) and “Policies

of Organisations” in the research federation on

Work, Employment and Public Policies (TEPP,

National Centre for Scientific Research). Her

main interests are the study of changes within

public and private organizations, their economic

performance, and employee outcomes.

E-mail: nathalie.greenan@lecnam.net

Guillaume Pierné holds a PhD in economics

from the University of Paris-Saclay. He is currently

a fellow member of the Angevin Research Group

in Economics and Management (GRANEM) at

the Université d’Angers, Centre for Labor and

Employment Studies (CEET), and the research

federation on Work, Employment and Public Policies

(TEPP, National Centre for Scientific Research). His

research focuses on inequalities and discrimination

in the labor market, especially in access to

employment.

E-mail: guillaume.pierne@univ.angers.fr

Research Article