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.

Substantial literatures exist examining public personnel turnover and the role of gender in public management. We bring these two strands of research together to test hypotheses concerning the impact of manager gender on the job satisfaction and turnover of public sector workers. In particular, we test whether manager gender influences satisfaction and turnover per se versus the competing claim that gender congruence between managers and employees, regardless of gender, is the relevant construct. Using data from a nationally representative sample of public school teachers and principals and employing a fixed effects design that implicitly compares male and female employees in the same school, we find evidence that supervisor gender matters for satisfaction and turnover. We also find important effects of gender congruence, which appear to be driven by lower satisfaction and greater turnover among male teachers with female principals.

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Personal interactions between clients and street-level bureaucrats are signifi cant in explaining why street-level bureaucrats behave as they do. Not all bureaucracies that apply program rules to individuals, however, engage faceto-face with their clientele. As more intake procedures are automated, such "one-on-one" encounters decrease. Th e author generates and tests hypotheses about frontline bureaucratic decision making in the Social Security Disability program, by applying bounded rationality theory. Th e fi ndings show that eligibility decisions by street-level bureaucrats are aff ected by their adherence to subsets of agency goals and perceptions of others in the governance system. How quickly they make decisions also has an impact.Th ere is no evidence that the way in which bureaucrats evaluate clients explains their decisions when they lack face-to-face contact.

Studies of race representation in public organizations illustrate the importance of bureaucrat race in determining client-level outcomes. Building "upward" from this research, this study examines how supervisor race impacts outcomes for street-level bureaucrats using data from a nationally representative sample of public schools. Employing multiple estimation methods, we find that, consistent with the predictions of representation theory, teachers report higher job satisfaction and turn over less often when supervised by an own-race principal. We also find that race congruence impacts the tangible and intangible organizational benefits teachers receive, and, moreover, that race congruence impacts white and African American employees differently. Most troubling, we find evidence that black teachers earn substantially less in supplemental pay when they work for a white principal, even when compared to white teachers in the same school. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.Numerous public policies exist to overcome the historical disadvantageseconomic, educational, and otherwise-of minorities in the United States. Ultimately, the success of these policies depends on the ability of implementing organizations to serve the needs of minority clients. A rich literature shows that the representation of minorities within the bureaucracy, across a variety of agency settings, increases the ability of the bureaucracy to address minority client needs