Representative Bureaucracy and Public Service Performance : Where, Why and How Does Representativeness Work?

As issues of social equity and inclusiveness have become increasingly salient to political discourses, they are also more strongly emphasized as dimensions of effective public service delivery. As a consequence, representative bureaucracy has become more significant to the study of public management. The theory of representative bureaucracy assumes that several positive effects of representation in public organizations, such as perceptions of accessibility to power for groups in society and reflection of group preferences in bureaucratic decision making, will boost organizational performance. While previous empirical studies have examined this performance claim of representative bureaucracy theory, this paper argues that to gain a full understanding of representative bureaucracy academic inquiry should be devoted to the role of context, both theoretically and empirically. To substantiate this the paper reviews the literature on contextual factors salient to representative bureaucracy and theorizes on how these factors condition the impact of bureaucratic representation on public policy and performance