The Promise of Representative Bureaucracy

This prize-winning study examines the impact of the employment of women and ethnic and racial minorities in public organizations on the implementation of government programs by those agencies. Driving the study is the question of whether the concept of representative government applies also to the permanent government--the bureaucracy. What difference does it make if an administration is either more or less representative of the population it serves? To what extent, if at all, is an agency's responsiveness to different segments of the public a function of the demographic composition of the agency itself? This study, which won the Leonard D. White award, is the most systematic test to date of the concept of representative bureaucracy. Selden tests the relationship between the demographic representativeness of district office staffs and lending decisions in the Farmers Home Administration's Rural Housing Loans Program. In fleshing out the implications of representative bureaucracy, the book makes an important contribution to the debates on bureaucratic power and illuminates the tensions underlying the assumptions of bureaucratic neutrality and affirmative action.