Representative Bureaucracy: A Reassessment

Abstract

The term “representative bureaucracy” was first given currency in 1949 through Donald Kingsley's book with the same title and since then it has gained popularity through the discussions of a few American political scientists and British sociologists. The underlying concept, however, is still subject to some confusion owing in part to its normative overtones. This paper attempts, in the first place, to analyse some important sources of confusion and, secondly, to show the practical difficulties in the realization of a representative bureaucracy by comparing the social backgrounds of civil servants in different countries.

Representative Bureaucracy and Bueaucratic Responsibility

“…Subramanian (1967), for example, in reassessing the case for representative bureaucracy, argues that the civil service is inherently a middle-class institution and hence will be representative only if the dominant group in society is the middle class and then only if there exists a widely shared sociopolitical consensus. More generally, analysis of representative bureaucracy which examine the distribution of representation only in terms of class, race, sex, and so on have been criticized because they substitute secondary measures (socioeconomic characteristics) for the desired primary measures (values), when very little is known about the relationship between the two.…”

“…It has never been clear how responsiveness to represented groups would actually be reflected in policy. As Subramanian (1967Subramanian ( : 1014 states the problem, &dquo;If the various classes represented have all different and conflicting interests and if their members in the bureaucracy advocate mainly class interests-in accord with the basic argument-the result is likely to be a divided and even ineffectual bureaucracy.&dquo; He goes on to argue that a more likely consequence would be formal and informal contacts and bargaining among bureaucrats having different social backgrounds, which would result in policies reflecting this mutual accommodation. Thus, as Larson (1973: 85) contends, &dquo;While representativeness might prevent the bureaucracy from favoring particular groups at the expense of others, it is not clear how it would insure by itself that the bureaucracy would serve the needs and interests of all groups equally.&dquo; This theoretical confusion about the nature of policies developed by responsive bureaucrats hinders effective operationalization of a substantive product test of responsiveness.…”

“Representative Bureaucracy” and the Senior Civil Service in Hong Kong

“…3 Studies of Indian bureaucratic practice seem to confirm this finding. 4 Because Hong Kong also lacks democratic institutions and yet its government strives to administer the colony in a liberal climate, the concept of a representative bureaucracy may be worthy of our consideration.…”

Workforce Diversity: Downsizing in the NYPD and its Effect on Minority Integration

“…Nachmias and Rosenbloom (1973) illustrated the use of the measure of variation (MV) to assess the degree of ethnic or racial integration in federal agencies. With regard to validating the use of the measure of variation, Guajardo (1996) correlated the index against the Subramaniam (1967) index of representation and the Hellriegel and Short (1972) index. Guajardo found that the measure of variation is statistically correlated with the Subramaniam and Hellriegel and Short indices.…”