What explains variation in representation in the public sector? Predicting the presence of female officers in U.S. College Police Departments

This study tests the explanatory power of two prominent public administration theories-political control and representative bureaucracy-in understanding disparities in public service provision. While prior research focused on street-level bureaucracy, we study here how political and group identities of top elected law enforcement officials affect the distribution of youth arrests, alternatives, and prosecutions among minority groups. Data from Florida's 67 counties between 2015 and 2020 demonstrate that sheriff's and state attorney's party affiliation, race, and ethnicity do affect street-level outcomes. However, the effects are more pronounced for race than ideology. Also, representative bureaucracy appears more relevant for race than ethnicity and explains the behavior of Black sheriffs but not Black state attorneys.

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Justice in Black and Brown: The impact of political control and representative bureaucracy on street level outcomes

Jackson

Neshkova

Meier

2023

“…Cheng and Ali (2023) suggest that adopting a social equity priority is part of a tiered pathway to sustainability rather than a strategy built on three parts or legs. Rutherford and Mee (2022) seek to explain the representation of female police officers on college campuses but fail to find a few consistent predictive characteristics.…”

Section: In This Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Scholarly hypocrisy or apostasy in public administration: Preaching to the choir, or to an empty room?

Hall,

McDonald

2023

As a discipline, public administration is at a crossroads. This is hardly the first time that concern has been raised about public administration scholarship's position (see Dubnick, 2018;Ostrom, 1973;Stivers & McDonald, 2023), but we currently find ourselves in a situation as unique as it is potentially dire. Like other disciplines, research within public administration has its roots in improving practice (Perry, de Graaf, van der Wal, & van Montfort, 2014;Vogel & Hattke, 2022). The creation of professional public administration education programs, namely Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs, coupled the basic and applied research of faculty with teaching and gave students access to state-of-the-art solutions to the novel policy and management problems of the day (Farrell, Hatcher, & Diamond, 2022;McDonald, Hatcher, & Abbott, 2022). Research and institutional expectations for extramural research funding, however, have driven a wedge between these two primary faculty functions (Coggburn & Neely, 2015;Tayaban & O'Leary, 2022). The growing emphasis to publish or perish creates a divide between what we teach in the classroom and the research we conduct back in our offices. So divergent are these needs that a proliferation of teaching professors and adjunct faculty is common in many large public policy schools. Moreover, there is a developing generational rift between scholars who see their purpose as contributing to the core theory of the discipline and publishing accordingly, versus those who dedicate their time to highly-applied sponsored research projects. The value proposition for faculty at research universities is now somewhere between a dual path that recognizes faculty for both publications and research funding, and a tangible shift in preference for the pocketbook over the publications that distinguish faculty, units, and universities.Let us be honest from the start-much of the research published in our journals today is completely inaccessible to lay practitioners. Overly theoretical work lacks a tangible connection to real-world problems. Sophisticated

Passive representation: The effect of affirmative action bans on female representation in law enforcement

Nam

2024

Studies of representative bureaucracy often focus on underrepresented social groups in the public sector and examine the link between passive representation and active or symbolic representation. This study emphasizes that passive representation is not a fixed condition but can be influenced by policy interventions and shaped by historical passive representation. This study proposes hypotheses that affirmative action bans at the state level, which were adopted with an expectation to yield neutral outcomes by proponents, may not lead to neutral outcomes but can disproportionately decrease female representation in law enforcement. It tests hypotheses using both staggered and two‐way fixed‐effects difference‐in‐difference methods with city‐level panel data from 1988 to 2019. The findings indicate that affirmative action bans have decreased female representation in cities with more than 100 sworn officers. This study provides empirical evidence that the absence of affirmative action may result in the decreased representation of underrepresented and marginalized social groups.