In 2013, the United States is becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse.  With these demographic changes, attitudes and approaches toward representation are likewise shifting. Public administration scholarship and practice can continue to contribute to this dynamic process of defining representation and crafting initiatives to meet the needs of the public. To do this, social injustices of the past must be addressed through the recognition and valuation of historically-underrepresented groups in public organizations. Yet, much public affairs discourse and numerous policy decisions are rooted in multiculturalism.  The central question this research explores is whether multiculturalism is detrimental to theorizing and to enacting a representative bureaucracy, and if so, why. To answer this question, the work begins with a critical review of the representative bureaucracy, affirmative action, and multiculturalism literatures.  Then, linking these reviews to practice, the study performs a critical discourse analysis of several executive orders and guidance documents from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to trace how views of representation in U.S. national government agencies changed between 1998 and 2011.  This research finds that a shift from "Affirmative Action" to "Multiculturalism" occurred.  EOs 13078, 13163, and 13171 were heavily rooted in the Affirmative Action approach, while the 2000 OPM Agency Diversity Guide, EOs 13518 and 13583, and the Government-Wide Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan 2011 were anchored in the "Multicultural" approach.  Ultimately, this study concludes that multiculturalism poses significant challenges for representative bureaucracy as a result of its lack of clear and explicit definitions and its treatments of differences, especially group-identity classifications.  Rethinking the relationship between representative bureaucracy and multiculturalism and focusing on historically-underrepresented groups hold the potential to contribute to the further attainment of normative goals of bureaucratic representation. / Ph. D.

This dissertation analyzes the effects of Latino immigration on the representation of Latinos and African-Americans on school boards and attempts to explain under what conditions Latino immigrants provoke opposition among whites. I consider two measures of representation based on representative bureaucracy—the membership of Latinos and African-Americans on school boards and bias in the responsiveness of white school board members toward these two groups. Whites as the major racial group in the U.S. have been the subject of much intergroup relations research focusing on competition for scarce resources, perceived threat and group biases (e.g., Evans and Giles, 1986; Giles and Evans, 1985, 1986; Esses, Jackson and Armstrong, 1998), and I also focus on their racial behaviors as voters in school board elections and as school board members. I consider Latino immigration in this research because emerging evidence suggests that Latino immigration poses a growing threat to whites, leading them to shift their support from Latinos to a countervailing group, such as African-Americans (e.g., Meier and Stewart, 1991; Rocha, 2007). It is likely that the reactions of whites to Latino immigration are conditioned by their preexisting racial attitudes, so this dissertation also tests competing theories of community racial climate—group threat and group contact. I expect that racial tensions within a community should moderate the influence of Latino immigration on these two forms of Latino and African-American representation. Overall, this dissertation expands the study of representative bureaucracy by combining past research on community racial climates with conditions influencing minority representation.

With increased immigration into western democracies, how to establish generalised trust in society has received new attention. Are minorities and immigrants low trust levels best remediated through Putnam’s theory of civil organisation engagement or Rothstein’s theory of impartial institutions? Simultaneously, people are hired based on their cultural identity to work with minorities and immigrants in Swedish public administration, which is thought to increase the target group’s trust. This resembles the ideas of representative bureaucracy and conflicts with traditional merit recruitment and Rothstein’s theory. This thesis uses an inductive ideal type method based on an assumption of thin rationality to study the phenomena of hiring based on cultural identity, which it names cultural professionalism. It askes firstly, what does cultural professionalism contribute with that makes it desirable for actors in public administration and how is this related to trust? Secondly, what are the trade-offs when using cultural professionalism in public administration? Through studying the rational of the phenomena for actors directly affected by it, the findings indicate that cultural professionalism is a way to communicate information and legitimise implementation towards minority groups. The cultural professionals use their trustworthiness within the group to link implementation and information from public administration towards the group, and information from the group towards public administration. This information also has a socialising potential. The trust is however particularised, i.e. not bridged to public administration. Problematic logics discovered in the material are evaluated towards the three values of public administration: democracy, rule of law and efficiency. In sum, cultural professionals imply trade-offs for democracy and rule of law, and appears to favour efficiency. Lastly, cultural professionalism is described and defined as a “new” ideal type legitimacy model in policy implementation.

This dissertation analyzes the effects of Latino immigration on the representation of Latinos and African-Americans on local school boards and attempts to explain under what conditions Latino immigrants provoke opposition among whites. I consider two measures of representation based on representative bureaucracy—the membership of Latinos and African-Americans on school boards and bias in the responsiveness of white school board members toward these two groups. Whites as the major racial group in the U.S. have been the subject of much intergroup relations research focusing on competition for scarce resources, perceived threat and group biases (e.g., Evans and Giles, 1986; Giles and Evans, 1985, 1986; Esses, Jackson and Armstrong, 1998), and I also focus on their racial behaviors as voters in school board elections and as school board members. I consider Latino immigration in this research because emerging evidence suggests that Latino immigration poses a growing threat to whites, leading them to shift their support from Latinos to a countervailing group, such as African-Americans (e.g., Meier and Stewart, 1991; Rocha, 2007). First, I examine whether Latino immigration into a community affects the support of white citizens for Latino or African-American membership on school boards. Second, I examine whether white school board members also are influenced by Latino immigration in their responsiveness to Latino and African-American parents. It is likely that the reactions of whites to Latino immigration are conditioned by their preexisting racial attitudes, so this dissertation also tests competing theories of community racial climate—group threat and group contact. I expect that racial tensions within a community should moderate the influence of Latino immigration on these two forms of Latino and African-American representation. Overall, this dissertation expands the study of representative bureaucracy by combining past research on community racial climates with conditions influencing minority representation. In addition to examining the determinants of passive representation, this dissertation links expectations of the racial behavior of white citizens with the behavior of white school board members by considering the possibility that school board members express “discriminatory intent” (Mendez and Grose, 2014) on non-policy related matters. A better understanding of the determinants of public officials’ personal biases should help to explain the targeting of substantive policy benefits to minorities, which is the focus of much other representative bureaucracy research. While I base my analysis of school board membership on inferences of white voter behavior from aggregate election results, I directly measure white school board member responsiveness using data gathered from a novel randomized field experiment and e-mail audit design. Representative bureaucracy researchers have called for more of this type of individual-level data to help explain minority advocacy (Bradbury and Kellough, 2011).

According to representative bureaucracy theory, a bureaucracy that mirrors the population it serves—in terms of demographic composition—is more responsive to the interests of all groups in the population. Most research in this area has examined the link between passive representation (i.e., occurrences in which minority bureaucrats mirror the population) and active representation (i.e., occurrences in which minority bureaucrats actively pursue the interests of those they represent). Less attention has been directed toward the notion that different mechanisms can make representative bureaucracy have an effect. Focusing on the German public school sector, the aim of this study is to understand through which mechanisms teachers with migration backgrounds can have an impact on their students and how they become representatives. The German government has recently begun to support intensified recruitment of people with migration background into the teacher workforce. Assessing the mechanisms of representation is, thus, not only crucial for a better theoretical understanding of representative bureaucracy, but it can also provide policy guidance for future government efforts. The mechanisms include demand inducement, coproduction inducement, advocacy, shared values and empathic understanding, and peer influence. Substantive effects are operationalized as students’ grades, career expectations, and perceived classroom climate. Applying a sequential mixed-methods approach, OLS regressions based on data from 194 surveys collected at six German high schools measure the mediating effect of the mechanisms on the relationship between the representation of students and the three substantive effects. Furthermore, a comprehensive qualitative analysis of 26 in-depth interviews provides insight into teachers’ perceptions on their role as representatives. Overall, the findings indicate that for the occurrence of most mechanisms, a teacher’s personality is at least as crucial as a common migration background. A mediating effect of demand and coproduction inducement on the relationship between passive representation and substantive effects was found in the quantitative analysis. The qualitative analysis reveals the importance of empathic understanding and advocacy as mechanisms of representation and points to the potential of peer influence as influential mechanism of representation. Furthermore, the findings highlight the importance of matching backgrounds and a critical mass of teachers with migration background in the workforce to overcome racism.

The tenets of representative bureaucracy suggest that the composition of the bureaucracy should mirror the people it serves including women in order to influence the name, scope, and implementation of public policies. Women are still underrepresented in mid-to-upper management in male-dominated occupations. When women are under-represented in mid-to-upper levels of management in government, there are implications regarding representative bureaucracy. This study examined the career progression experiences of women who were successful in reaching mid-to-upper levels of management in male-dominated occupations in state government. Specifically, the study explored how women perceive various occupational factors including their rates of participation, experiences, gender, roles within the bureaucracy, interactions with their coworkers, leaders and organizational policies, personal influence, and decision-making abilities. The findings revealed that women experience various barriers to career progression in male-dominated occupations, but find mechanisms to navigate obstacles imposed by the negative consequences of tokenism. The findings indicate that although women have been successful in reaching mid-to-upper level management in male-dominated occupations, they do so in institutions, regional, district, field or offices with fewer overall employees where they have less opportunity to have influence on overall agency-wide policy decisions. The decision-making power is limited to implementation strategies of agency-wide policies within their smaller domains or geographical area of responsibility.

In this study, I examine the factors that influence school districts’ commitment to implement ESL (English as a Second Language) education in compliance with the federal Bilingual Education Act of 1968. To explain variation in implementation effort, I focus on several features of the local implementation environment, including the role of Latino descriptive representation. Utilizing data on all public school districts in Texas, I employ a Heckman two-stage estimation procedure that accounts for factors that influence school districts’ decisions to implement bilingual education programs as well as factors that affect the amount of resources school districts are willing to allocate towards bilingual education. The results indicate that Latino school board and teacher representation play a positive and statistically significant role in determining: 1) whether school districts implement bilingual education programs; and 2) the level of expenditures and teacher positions allocated towards bilingual education. Thus, policy implementation outcomes translate into substantive representation.

With over two million inmates, the United States’ prison population is the largest in the world. Nearly one in one hundred Americans are behind bars, either in prisons or pre-trial detention facilities. The rapid growth in incarceration is well-documented. However, social science explanations often stop at the prison gates, with little work on treatment inside prisons. This black box approach ignores important bureaucratic decisions, including the provision of rehabilitative services and the application of punishment. This dissertation offers a systematic analysis of treatment decisions inside the American prisons. I use a mixed methods approach, combining multiple quantitative datasets with environmental observation at four prisons, and original interviews of twenty-three correctional staff members. I offer the only large-n comparative analysis of American state prisons. Characteristics of the inmates as well as characteristics of staff are explored. I am able to analyze data at the state, facility and individual level. All of this is to answer a crucial and somewhat overlooked question; how do prison staff decide who should be punished and who should receive rehabilitative treatment? I find that theories of social construction offer insight into the treatment of American prison inmates. Specifically, I find that socially constructed racial categories offer explanatory value for inmate treatment. Black and Hispanic inmates are less likely to receive important rehabilitative programs, including access to mental health and medical care. Black and Hispanic inmates are also more likely to receive punishment including the use of solitary confinement in administrative segregation units. I find, consistent with theories of representative bureaucracy that staffing characteristics also impact treatment decisions, with black and Hispanic staff members expressing lower preferences for punishment and prisons with higher percentages of black staff members utilize administrative segregation less. I provide a historical overview of the changing social constructions of crime and prisons inside the United States, from colonial to present day America. I argue that the treatment of prisoners changes as our conception of crime changes. I discuss recent bipartisan attempts at prison reform and offer my own suggestions for reform of the American prison system.

As recent immigrants seek a productive and dignified life in “new immigrant destinations” that have little historical experience with immigration, public education systems serve a key function in immigrant integration efforts. In a federal system increasingly focused on accountability, a crucial sub-set of education policy and local responsiveness to immigration is English language instruction and services for Limited English Proficient (LEP) students and parents. In such contexts, the role that local bureaucrats play, and whether they actively represent the interests of the newfound diversity of community members, are crucial questions if strongly held American ideals of social equity and equal opportunity are to be upheld. This research asks broad questions at the intersection of bureaucratic power, representative bureaucracy and educational policy toward English language learners at the local level. Variations in how school systems in the political bellwether of Virginia responded to a recent policy shock - federal guidance released in January 2015 that reiterated local school system responsibility for providing equal educational access to LEP students and parents – form a unique window into local policy-making. Using a concurrent triangulation mixed methodology that consists of a state-wide survey and interviews with a sub-set of the Title III coordinators who supervise programs for English Language Learners, this research shows Title III coordinators to be unrepresentative in passive terms of the foreign born population but nevertheless to have a strong sense of advocating for English Language Learners. Findings suggest that public service motivation is the key explanatory factor in driving a sense of role advocacy and this in turn drives a greater range of action taking by the coordinator to benefit ELLs. Despite this link between role advocacy and coordinator action, role advocacy is not found to be significant in driving the likelihood or range of system level responsiveness to the letter. Instead, political and demographic factors increase the likelihood of system action but, counter to existing literature, more conservative localities are found to be more likely to have responded to the Dear Colleague Letter. This suggests that a previous reluctance to act in these places may have been dislodged by the letter and points to the importance of change over time in conceptualizing local responsiveness to immigrants.

公務人員受委託行使行政權，享有身分保障和穩定收入，因而被視為社會體系的中上階層。基於此等特性，學者曾經提出代表性官僚理論與多元代表性等理論，希望能夠以此調和民主與效率兩大價值，達成政策執行的實質公平。然過去相關的實證研究，多半屬於「事後檢測」。但是我國公民除了通過公務人員考試之外，幾乎沒有其他擠身常任文官的管道，因此有關代表性或多元性的討論應該包括考試階段。換言之，考試錄取人員的人口特性值得深入的分析。本研究以2003至2007年的高等考試參與者為主要研究對象，輔以司法官三等考試的資料以利比較。接著，引用社會學「地位取得」的分析架構，採取指數比較分析與邏輯迴歸分析，探索性別、年齡、受教育時間、畢業學校特性、出身地域與錄取與否的關係。 　　本研究結果顯示，女性、非傳統公立綜合大學的畢業生、鄉鎮地區出身者以及41歲以上的考生在公務人員考試中處於較為不利的地位，但是與優勢團體之間的差距隨著考試等級和種類有所不同。例如女性在行政類與司法官考試中，與男性的表現平分秋色甚至猶有過之；剛完成高等教育的25歲以下人口在司法官考試裡最具優勢，但高考三級則有利於26至35歲的青年；傳統公立大學的文憑與都市出身的背景，在技術類考試能發揮的正效果比行政類考試為弱。基於上述的研究發現，為消除各種團體在公務人員考試裡的地位差距，本研究對於未來的考選政策提出下列建議：1.加強命題與口試委員的多元化；2.強化試題的研究發展；3.配合政府再造鬆綁人事法規；4.營造一個落實多元平等的大環境。 / Civil servants, with administrative power in hand, are commonly regarded as part of upper class. Therefore, researchers, to integrate democracy and efficiency in civil service system and to realize the genuine equality, propose representative bureaucracy and team diversity theory. Senior Civil Service Examination, the main approach, if not only, for citizens in Taiwan to enter the bureaucracy affects the representativeness and diversity of state apparatus substantially. By adopting the research approach of “status attainment” from sociology, this study gives an account of the relation between the examination result and the demographics in terms of gender, education, school characteristic, and region. All the data of this research is based on participators’ personnel information cards collected by the Ministry of Examination from 2003 to 2007. The result indicates that four types of participators are inferior in the examination, including women, graduates from private untraditional technological colleges, participators from rural areas, and adults above forty-one years old. The differences between superior and inferior groups, however, vary with the level and subject of examination. To prevent demographic differences in Senior Civil Service Examination, the study suggests the following factors be considered: the diversity of the composition of examiners committee should be ensured, the enhancement of development research of test questions, the deregulation of public personnel rules and, last but not least, the construction of a diversity-respecting society.