Representative Bureaucracy 63
A large portion of empirical research on representative bureaucracy in the United
States is thus devoted to examining the extent to which bureaucracy refl ects the
basic demographic composition of society. Th e general fi nding of this research
is that minorities and women are proportionally represented in bureaucracy as
a whole but are underrepresented in the upper levels of bureaucratic hierarchies
(Selden 1997, 45).
Th e second question deals with the concept of “active representation,” or
the relationship between passive representation and policy outputs or out-
comes. Again, it was Krislov who made the key contribution to shaping schol-
arly thought on this issue. He argued that the demographic composition of the
bureaucracy provides only indirect evidence of the representative nature of
bureaucracy. Th e social profi le of any given bureaucrat—race, sex, education,
and so forth—provides only a limited indication of that bureaucrat’s ability to
advance the interests of these demographic groups. It is not enough, in other
words, to fi nd that women and minorities are roughly proportionally repre-
sented in the ranks of the civil service. Any serious claim that bureaucracy is a
representative institution requires evidence that passive representation trans-
lates into active representation, that the more women and minorities join the
civil service, the more the policy outputs of bureaucracies represent the broad
interests of women and minorities.
Considering its importance to the theory of representative bureaucracy, it is
not surprising that there has been a growing body of empirical work on this lat-
ter issue. Studies by Kenneth Meier and various colleagues (Meier, Stewart, and
England 1989; Meier and Stewart 1992; Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard 1999) have
consistently found that minority representation in the civil service is related to
policy outputs that favor the minority group. Th ese studies have exclusively fo-
cused on education and the eff ects of minority representation on policy outputs
(the research examined the impact of minority representation in teaching, on
administrative and school board positions concerning school policies, and on
outputs that aff ected minorities). Some research outside education has produced
more mixed results (Hindera 1993a, 1993b; Selden 1997). However, much other
research indicates that the conditions found by Meier and his colleagues do exist
for other agency types as well as for representation for women (Keiser, Wilkins,
Meier, and Holland 2002; Meier and Nicholson-Crotty 2006; Lim 2006; Wilkins
and Keiser 2006). One more recent example is on the enforcement of immigra-
tion law (Lewis et al. 2012), where municipal police forces, if granted discretion
by the city council, enforce the law less intensively if the police chief is Hispanic/
Latino.
A further development in the literature is to incorporate the concept of sym-
bolic representation, which, unlike active representation, works cognitively on
the public. Th us, when bureaucrats share the identifi cation, experience, and
characteristics of a portion of the public, that audience will perceive the actions
of those bureaucrats as legitimate, even if the bureaucrats are not purposefully