A good deal of research has been generated over the past several decades on representative bureaucracy. The theory of representative bureaucracy holds that bureaucratic institutions should socially or demographically reflect the communities they serve (Meier 1993a; Meier 1993b). While passive and active representation have been studied extensively by the public management and administration communities, relatively fewer studies have been generated on another aspect of representative bureaucracy: symbolic representation, which holds that substantive benefits can be derived from passively represented bureaucracies (Gade and Wilkins 2013).
Theobald and Haider-Markel’s (2009) research, for example, shows that the mere presence of African-American police officers will enhance African Americans’ trust of the police, thereby creating greater legitimacy for the law enforcement agency within the community. Similarly, Riccucci, Van Ryzin and Lavena (2014), using an experimental design, found that increasing the number of women in a hypothetical local domestic violence unit increased perceptions of trust, fairness, and job performance of the agency. And, importantly, their findings indicate that the symbolic representativeness of the police influences how all citizens, not simply women, view and judge a law enforcement agency. More recently, Riccucci, Van Ryzin and Li (2016) found that the representation of women in a recycling program increased women’s intentions to not only recycle hard plastics but to also participate in the arduous task of composting such items as meats, vegetables, fruits, eggshells and dairy products.
The current symbolic representation study relies on a 2 x 2 factorial experiment to test whether varying the number of African-American police officers in a hypothetical police department, along with varying the civilian complaints of police misconduct, including the number of stop-and-frisk complaints (see Wilkins and Williams 2008), influences citizens’ perceptions of performance, trustworthiness and fairness. Participants are a balanced sample of half black and half white (non-Hispanic) US respondents nationwide who are part of an online research panel.
References
Gade, Daniel M., and Vicky M. Wilkins. 2013. Where did you serve? Veteran identity, representative bureaucracy, and vocational rehabilitation. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 23:267–88.
Meier, Kenneth J. 1993a. Latinos and representative bureaucracy: Testing the Thompson and Henderson hypotheses. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 3: 393-414.
Meier, Kenneth J. 1993b. Representative bureaucracy: A theoretical and empirical exposition. Research in Public Administration 2: 1-35.
Riccucci, Norma M, Gregg G. Van Ryzin, and Huafang Li. 2016. Representative Bureaucracy and the Willingness to Coproduce: An Experimental Study. Public Administration Review 76(1): 121-130.
Riccucci, Norma M., Gregg G. Van Ryzin, and Cecilia F. Lavena. 2014. Representative Bureaucracy in Policing: Does It Increase Perceived Legitimacy? Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 24 (3): 537-51.
Theobald, Nick A., and Donald P. Haider-Markel. 2009. Race, Bureaucracy, and Symbolic Representation: Interactions Between Citizens and Police. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 19(2):409–26.
Wilkins, Vicky M. and Brian N. Williams. 2008. Black or Blue: Racial Profiling and Representative Bureaucracy, 68(4): 654–664.
F1a - Behavioral and Experimental Public Administration: Citizen-State Interactions
