From Organizational Values to Organizational Roles: Examining Representative Bureaucracy in State Administration

Over the past four decades, nonwhites and women have made slow but important progress toward expanding their numbers in the higher reaches of state administration, although they are not yet proportionately represented in top-level policy-making positions in the American states. A question that prior research has not addressed is whether such passive representation-numerical employment in state bureaucracy-is linked to more active representation-expression of distinctive policy or program attitudes. Toward that end, this inquiry develops a model of representative bureaucracy and tests it empirically in a large sample of state agency directors. It examines the potential for active representation of nonwhites and women by senior state administrators, the heads of agencies across the fifty states. The model incorporates as a crucial variable the administrators' conceptions of their organizational work role; the role set is based on the values or goals senior state administrators hold for their agencies. The empirical analysis demonstrates that demographic variables such as race and gender can affect bureaucratic attitudes and behaviors indirectly through the mediating influence of the organizational role set. The findings also suggest that on certain issues and behaviors, race and gender can manifest direct effects. The article discusses the implications of these findings for theories of representative bureaucracy