REPRESENTATIVE BUREAUCRACY AND DISTRIBUTIONAL EQUITY: ADDRESSING THE HARD QUESTION Forthcoming Journal of Politics

Research on representative bureaucracy has failed to deal with whether or not representative bureaucracies produce minority gains at the expense of nonminorities. Using a pooled time series analysis of 350 school districts over six years, this study examines the relationship between representative bureaucracy and organizational outputs for minorities and nonminorities. Far from finding that representative bureaucracy produces minority gains at the expense of nonminorities, this study finds both minority and nonminority students perform better in the presence of a representative bureaucracy. This finding suggests an alternative hypothesis to guide research, that representative bureaucracies are more effective than their nonrepresentative counterparts. Representative Bureaucracy and Distributional Equity: Addressing the Hard Question Despite initial skepticism that a bureaucracy widely representative of the people would make policy decision more responsive to the public (Meier and Nigro 1976), recent studies for both blacks and Latinos have found that under certain conditions passive racial and ethnic representation can produce active representation, that is policies that benefit minorities (Meier and Stewart 1991; Hindera 1993a; 1993b; Meier 1993; Seldon, Brudney and Kellough 1998). Such findings in widely differing bureaucracies from urban school districts to EEOC regional offices to Farmer's Home Administration loan programs generate some optimism simply because public bureaucracies are slowly becoming more representative in terms of race and ethnicity. At the same time, policy outcomes are often perceived as a zero-sum game, the gains of one group must be compensated for with losses from another. The fervor of the current affirmative action debate, for example, reflects the sincere beliefs by some whites that such policies take opportunities away from individuals simply because they are white (Eastland 1996). This study seeks to move the literature on representative bureaucracy to a direct consideration of such redistributional consequences. Given the inter-racial and inter-ethnic distributional concerns, empirical work on this question is desperately needed. 2 First, a brief review of representative bureaucracy theory is presented. The theory has evolved from a rather simple view of bureaucratic motivation to a fairly involved description of how individuals' values affect decisions in complex organizations. Second, we present a model based on this review and operationalize it using data from school districts in Texas. Because our concern is redistributional consequences, we estimate the impact of representative bureaucracy on both minority and Anglo students. These equity concerns are best illustrated through traditional regression analysis and a relatively recent analytical technique, substantively weighted least squares (SWLS). Third, using the results of this model, we suggest an alternative specification of how representative bureaucracies might influence public policy and a new hypothesis about representative bureaucracies. The Theory of Representative Bureaucracy Until ten years ago, the theory of representative bureaucracy was relatively simple. In every organization individuals who make decisions exercise discretion because organization rules cannot cover every contingency and because organizational socialization is rarely total (Downs 1967; Thompson 1967). If individuals are assumed to be utility maximizers, then individual bureaucrats with discretion are likely to use that discretion to make decisions that reflect their own values. One source of these values is the socialization process, and one of the most enduring