Representative Bureaucracy, Ethnicity, and Public Schools

• Author: David W. Pitts
• Published date: 01 July 2007
• Date: 01 July 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095399707303129
• Subject Matter: Articles

Representative

Bureaucracy, Ethnicity,

and Public Schools

Examining the Link Between

Representation and Performance

David W. Pitts

Georgia State University, Atlanta

Demographic changes in the United States have led to challenges for public

organizations that are tasked to serve shifting target populations. Many argu-

ments exist for including greater numbers of ethnic minorities among an

organization’s personnel, under the guise that greater ethnic representation

will result in greater competitiveness in the market or effectiveness in gover-

nance. This article tests this proposition empirically, using data from the

public education policy setting. Results show that representativeness along

ethnic lines leads to gains for the organization as a whole, but some segments

of the target population appear to respond more positively to representative-

ness than others.

Keywords: representative bureaucracy; ethnicity; diversity

Demographic changes in the United States have led to challenges for

public organizations that are tasked to serve shifting target popula-

tions. As the United States becomes increasingly diverse along ethnic lines,

many government and nonprofit organizations are seeing drastic changes to

the ethnic makeup of the individuals that they serve, making affirmative

action programs and other means of diversifying personnel more important

than ever. For public administration scholars, a number of issues related to

ethnicity have arisen in the research literature. As ethnic diversity increases,

it is important to understand whether public organizations are keeping up

by hiring and promoting ethnic minorities, whether such increased ethnic

representation has positive or negative consequences with regard to perfor-

mance and whether certain groups within the target population benefit more

from representation than others.

Administration & Society

Volume 39 Number 4

July 2007 497-526

© 2007 Sage Publications

10.1177/0095399707303129

http://aas.sagepub.com

hosted at

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497

Many arguments for including greater numbers of ethnic minorities

among an organization’s personnel stem from the belief that greater repre-

sentation (ethnic or otherwise) will result in greater competitiveness in the

market or effectiveness in governance (Thomas, 1990). However, very little

empirical research has connected high levels of ethnic representation to

high levels of organizational performance using public sector data (Pitts,

2005; Wise & Tschirhart, 2000). This article will help to fill a gap in the lit-

erature by looking at ethnic representation and its impact on organizational

performance. I will construct a model connecting ethnic representation and

a series of performance outcomes, testing it using data from the public edu-

cation policy setting. In the next section, I will outline the theoretical base

for the study, followed by a discussion of the methods and measures that I

plan to use. I will conclude by considering the results.

Representative Bureaucracy Theory

The notion of a representative bureaucracy was first articulated by

Donald Kingsley in 1944. Kingsley coined the term representative bureau-

cracy in response to what he observed in the British civil service during

World War II (Kingsley, 1944). He argued that the British civil service was

effective in implementing the policies of the political party in power

because they both shared a middle-class economic orientation. This

common economic background, Kinsley argued, led to shared values and

norms, and such similarities made it more likely that those working in

bureaucracy would naturally agree with, and implement, the ideas of those

working in elected offices.

In the United States context, two studies followed Kingsley relatively

quickly, both arguing that representation can be a means of controlling

bureaucratic discretion. In 1946, David Levitan argued that external con-

trols on bureaucrats were relatively useless, that ex ante means of ensuring

bureaucratic accountability were likely to be ineffective, and that the only

way to ensure that bureaucrats used discretion appropriately was to make

them representative of the people they served. That way, Levitan argued,

they would be similar to an elected body because they would reflect the

wants and needs of the people by proxy. Soon after, Norton Long (1952)

expanded Levitan’s argument, writing that bureaucracy can actually be

even more representative than Congress and, as a result, has greater capac-

ity to promote democratic values. Long wrote,

498 Administration & Society