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The literature on representative bureaucracy argues that bureaucrats who reflect the diversity of citizens are more likely to be responsive to the public. Although substantial research has supported the claim, most studies are conducted in Western countries such as the United States, and the evidence from other contexts is extremely limited. This raises two important questions: Does the relationship remain valid in a centralized Asian country? If so, under what conditions does representative bureaucracy matter more? This study investigates these questions by using a data set on secondary education in South Korea. Findings suggest that female students perform better when they are taught by female teachers, which strengthens the external validity of the theory. The positive link between female teachers and female student performance is greater when teachers have more discretion and interact more with each other. However, value consensus weakens the relationship between gender representation and student performance. Clientele diversity matters in gender representation at the managerial level, but sector differences are not statistically supported. These findings illustrate the need to take both national and organizational contexts seriously in representative bureaucracy theory.

The critical efforts of essential workers during the COVID-19 crisis might have important implications for how individuals view government, nonprofit, and for-profit sector workers and their pay. This article explores views of employees' pay considering three rationales (anticipated judgment, motivation for work, and competency in that work) that might lead to a lower valuation of work in the public and nonprofit sectors (i.e., lower pay rationales), particularly among those who work in the for-profit sector. However, highlighting a concrete way that public and non-profit employees serve the public, such as providing services during COVID-19, might mitigate this negative effect by showing their commitment to public service in an intuitive way. Our survey experiment provides evidence that activating the competency or motivation rationales lowers the likelihood that nonprofit employees are viewed as underpaid among those who work in the for-profit sector when a concrete example of public service is not provided. However, we also find some evidence that an example of public service can help to counteract these effects.

Public managers and employees should be on the same page for successful performance. Managers' self-evaluations of their own management, however, often do not match employees' evaluations. Despite the consistent findings of a discrepancy between managers' and employees' perceptions of management, little research has examined how this perceptual incongruence affects employee job satisfaction. The present study addresses this question using parallel surveys from both managers and employees in the context of public education. The findings suggest managers overestimate their management effectiveness in general. As the perceptual gap between managers and employees increases, employees are less likely to be satisfied with their organization and their profession. We also find that this relationship is nonlinear, and the negative effects of incongruence could be accelerated when employees have considerable consensus about management. This study highlights the role of perceptual congruence in creating a better work environment and promoting job satisfaction for public employees.

Research on citizen satisfaction has emphasized the role of service quality (including expectations for quality) in shaping citizens' evaluations of public services. This article considers an understudied but important aspect of public service delivery—equity—and investigates how disparities in service outcomes between disadvantaged and advantaged groups affect citizens' evaluations of service providers. This study also examines whether citizens with different socioeconomic status (SES) have different perceptions toward the outcome disparities. Using individual-level data from secondary schools, we find that service users appear to recognize and care about a performance gap among social strata. Even when a student's individual outcome is held constant, satisfaction varies with the school-level performance gap between high-SES and low-SES students. This finding suggests that service users are concerned about not just their outcomes but also the relative positioning of outcomes for those of their own social group compared with other groups.

How public participation shapes effective and equitable service outcomes has been extensively discussed but rarely tested in the public administration literature. This article examines how parent participation in schools affects overall student performance and whether socially marginalized students benefit more or less when schools involve greater participation. Using a 63-country cross-national educational dataset, we show that parent involvement in school activities is not significantly related to overall student performance, but such efforts reduce the performance gap between immigrant and native-born students. This finding suggests that direct participation can reduce social disparities in program outcomes.

AbstractWhile widespread agreement that policing in the United States needs to be reformed arose in the summer of 2020, little consensus about specific reforms was reached. A common theme that arose, however, is a general lack of trust in the police. One response has been to increase agency diversity in terms of both officer race and officer gender. However, important questions exist about when – and what type(s) of – diversity shape citizen trust in and willingness to cooperate with the police – especially when considered in conjunction with agency performance and policies. To answer these questions, we use two conjoint experiments to evaluate whether citizens consider diversity when evaluating police agencies. We find that while both racial and gender diversity can influence public evaluations sometimes, these effects tend to emerge in the context of only the most (least) diverse institutions and are muted compared to the effects of agency policies and performance.

AbstractThe representative bureaucracy literature focuses on how passive representation translates into substantive benefits for the represented individuals. Although scholars have found substantial empirical support for representation based on gender, most studies have examined the United States, a country with high levels of democracy and gender equality compared to much of the rest of the world. This article first investigates whether the effects of gender representation differ across countries using cross‐national education data. Evidence from 44 countries shows that representative bureaucracy findings are relatively rare across the world. Second, this article contributes to contextual theories of representative bureaucracy by examining how the policy and political environments influence the link between passive representation and policy outcomes. The findings suggest that bureaucratic representation is more effective in countries where gender equality is high and political support for women is greater. These findings indicate that representative bureaucracy is enhanced by favorable policy and political environments.

AbstractPolitical scientists have increasingly begun to study how citizen characteristics shape whether—and how—they interact with the police. Less is known about how officer characteristics shape these interactions. In this article, we examine how one officer characteristic—officer sex—shapes the nature of police‐initiated contact with citizens. Drawing on literature from multiple fields, we develop and test a set of competing expectations. Using over four million traffic stops made by the Florida State Highway Patrol and Charlotte (North Carolina) Police Department, we find that female officers are less likely to search drivers than men on the force. Despite these lower search rates, when female officers do conduct a search, they are more likely to find contraband and they confiscate the same net amount of contraband as male officers. These results indicate that female officers are able to minimize the number of negative interactions with citizens without losses in effectiveness.