“…The core argument is that individuals “represent” by brokering knowledge about societal groups, rather than engaging in clientelistic behavior . The article draws on ideas and evidence from literature on organizational boundary spanning and street‐level bureaucracy (Durose, 2009; Quick & Feldman, 2014) as well as bureaucratic representation in non‐Western states (Fernandez, Koma, & Lee, 2018) and international organizations (Badache, 2019; Christensen et al, 2017; Gravier, 2013; Murdoch, Trondal, & Geys, 2016) to theorize bureaucratic knowledge linkage as the process by which bureaucrats—who possess advanced knowledge about a social environment which is affected by policy—share information and broker relations between their organization and that environment. Building on basic ontological categories, knowledge linkage is conceptualized as consisting of four mechanisms, differentiated according to the nature of knowledge that is being shared (objective informational or subjective relational knowledge) and whether linkage affects the administration or its environment: (a) the gathering of information/intelligence, (b) the dissemination of information, (c) the mitigation of coworker prejudices, and (d) the facilitation of local access.…”