Representative Bureaucracy: Examining the Linkage between Passive and Active Representation in the Farmers Home Administration

Abstract

Despite the extensive literature on representative bureaucracy, only a few studies have examined empirically whether bureaucracies with different levels of representativeness produce different policy outputs. This study adds to the growing body of empirical research by focusing on active representation of various groups of federal civil servants (African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans) in district offices of the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA). The analysis shows significant relationships between African American, Hispanic, and Asian American representation and the share of program resources allocated to those groups. The positive findings for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans suggest that these groups obtain larger allocations of resources as their representation increases, supporting the underlying assumptions of representative bureaucracy. The relationship between passive and active representation, however, is not statistically significant for Native Americans.