According to the theory of representative bureaucracy, passive representation among public employees will lead to active representation in bureaucratic outputs. Existing research demonstrates that the link between passive and active representation exists for race but not for sex. Past research on this topic has not, however, taken into account the contextual environment that affects whether sex will translate into gender and lead to active representation in the bureaucracy. In this paper, we create a framework that specifies the conditions that affect whether passive representation results in active representation for sex and then test this framework using the case of education. We find that passive representation of women in education leads to active representation and that the institutional context affects the extent to which this link between passive and active representation occurs.
Past theories of representative bureaucracy have four weaknesses: they assume that traditional controls are ineffective without empirical evidence, rely on secondary variables, omit the effects of lifetime socialization, and do not consider the role of individual bureaus. Because of these weaknesses, a representative bureaucracy need not be a responsive bureaucracy. Although restricted by secondary analysis, this paper seeks to eliminate these failings and empirically demonstrate the unrepresentative nature of the United States federal bureaucracy. The representativeness of various grade classifications, special services, and bureaus is also measured; and the United States upper civil service is compared to that of five other nations. After an attempt to measure the values of bureaucrats, the future concerns of the theory of representative bureaucracy are outlined.
Does public management matter for the performance of public programs? And if so, how? In what ways and via what routes does management shape what happens? Scholars of the subject are convinced of the importance of public management for performance.Considerable literature suggests myriad ways that the actions of managers seem to shape the outputs and outcomes of public policy.Still, for all the investment by researchers and practitioners in the assumption that management matters --and that, indeed, the requisites of good public management are reasonably well known, codifiable, and teachable --precious little careful analytical attention has been devoted to an explication of the basic questions.How might one test the crucial proposition that public management matters? Even more fundamentally, how ought one to model explicitly the impact of public management on governmental performance? To this significant question, surprisingly, there has been virtually no attention paid. This paper constitutes a first step on the road to modeling the performance of public management --in particular, how one might conceive of the relationship between the management and certain other important variables, vis-à-vis performance. 1 efforts by Ingraham and colleagues via the Government Performance Project. In that effort, the concept dealt with is "management capacity," rather than management (Ingraham and Kneedler 1999;Joyce and Ingraham 1998). Another approach is offered by Rainey and Steinbauer (1999), who sketch elements of a theory of "effective government organizations" (our units of analysis are government programs). They consider features of "leadership" and other possible elements of public management (like "development of human resources") but do not model the relationship among any of these elements, nor between them and other variables. Still, they seek a theoretical explanation of effectiveness and draw from empirical evidence to sketch propositions for testing. Rainey and Steinbauer base their work on the "argument that such theories as we have need much more articulation" (p. 2, note 2) and argue that not all hypothesized relationships should be expected to be linear. And, like us, they attend to the "accounts of the most influential and innovative agency leaders" which "emphasize their ability to turn into opportunities the constraints that supposedly impede many executives, and otherwise to cope with the pressures and complexities of their roles" (p. 20). The present effort seeks, among other things, an explicit representation of this opportunities-cum-constraints core of the public management function. We shall argue that public management encompasses significantly more than the POSDCORB notions of yesteryear, and we use our sketch of some of public management's requisites to develop what we regard as a plausible model for its impact on performance. 2 Models of Public-Managerial Impact: A Rationale for Two Steps ForwardWhat kinds of models have been developed to indicate --or hypothesize --the influence of the manageme...
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