| Bemerkung |
Decades ago already, scholars have started to ask about the social origin of public administrations’ workforces and how it affects their work. Based thereupon, representative bureaucracy theory (RBT) has developed as an influential concept in the public administration literature. One of its fundamental claims is that there is a link between passive and active representation, suggesting that the demographic composition of bureaucracies influences how they conduct their tasks. This follows the assumption that bureaucrats’ individual background leads to the formation of certain values and attitudes which then affect their behaviour.
RBT thereby holds profound implications for understanding the outcomes of public policies. Numerous studies have shown that an unequal distribution of the quality and quantity of public services across different social groups can be explained by an underrepresentation of such groups within administrative agencies. While these insights are mainly based on organizational-level analyses, more recent scholars have sought to test the theory’s micro-foundations, that is, whether, how, and under what conditions these patterns arise from differences in bureaucrats’ individual behaviour. Such studies reveal important nuances in the influence of bureaucrats’ social origin on administrative acting and shed light on the complex relationships between the active-passive link and other organizational and individual-level factors. They further show that much remains to be explored in order to gain a comprehensive theoretical and empirical picture of how bureaucratic representation mechanism function. This, in turn, has become of increasing importance: Societies are becoming ever more diverse - and so are the needs among citizens public administration must address.
In the seminar, we will reflect on RBT’s theoretical assumptions and discuss its relevance and (controversial) normative and practical implications. We will further trace the development of its research program. We thereby extensively engage with extant empirical insights and the methodological complications representative bureaucracy research faces. This also includes to deal with current theoretical and empirical shortcomings, open questions and present scholarly debates in this literature. |
