Representative Bureaucracy: A Lever to Enhance Social Equity,Coproduction, and Democracy

Scholars and practitioners have long questioned whether the race, ethnicity, and gender of public bureaucrats matter to the efficacy and legitimacy of public services. Representative bureaucracy theory and research provide a growing body of empirical evidence that it does. This article examines some of the rich scholarly work that has been generated on representative bureaucracy and its implications for practice. A significant aspect of recent research focuses on the notion of symbolic representation, whereby the mere existence of a passively represented bureaucracy can itself improve outcomes by influencing the attitudes and behaviors of clients, regardless of bureaucratic actions or results. This article is intended to help both students and public managers understand the importance of representativeness in public organizations for a broad spectrum of practices and goals, from the coproduction of services to democratic rule.     

Measuring bureaucratic reputation: Scale development and validation

Despite growing interest in bureaucratic reputation as a theoretical construct, the field lacks a standardized measure that can be used in surveys to capture individual‐level variation in the reputation judgments of citizens and other audiences. The aim of this article, therefore, is to develop a standardized, individual‐level measure of bureaucratic reputation based on the conceptual definition provided by Carpenter ( 2010 ). Employing feedback from experts and data from a survey of over 300 U.S. citizens, this article develops and tests a unidimensional scale of bureaucratic reputation, representing the content domains of performance, morality, procedural fairness, technical competence, and general reputation. Results suggest that our proposed bureaucratic reputation scale (BRS) has good internal reliability and that it is positively associated with support for autonomy, budget, and power, which provides evidence of criterion validity. Potential uses of the scale to study bureaucratic reputation are discussed.     

Drivers and Consequences of Citizen Satisfaction: An Application of the American Customer Satisfaction Index Model to New York City

Using data from two telephone surveys of New York City residents conducted during 2000 and 2001, this article employs the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) model to examine the drivers—and behavioral consequences—of overall satisfaction with local government services. While the ACSI model has been widely used to analyze customer satisfaction in the private sector and, more recently, in the federal government, it has not been tried in a local government context. Applying the ACSI model to New York City, we find the perceived quality of public schools and especially the police, as well as road conditions and subway service, are the most salient drivers of satisfaction, but the significance of each service varies across income, race, and geography. For all groups in the city, overall satisfaction drives both trust in local government officials and intentions to move out of the city. Advantages and limitations of using the ACSI model to assess the quality of local government services are discussed.