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"Politics, Policy, and Organizations goes beyond the traditional, passive view of administrative agencies to describe the vital role of bureaucratic organizations in a functioning democracy. By placing the agencies front and center, the authors make a powerful case that bureaucracy is really a fourth branch of government - albeit one that generally goes unnoticed except in times of emergency or deep national division

AbstractStudies of representative bureaucracy frequently reference the need for a critical mass before an underrepresented group can influence policy outputs or outcomes, but the empirical literature is modest and presents mixed findings. This article presents a theoretical exploration to illustrate how critical mass can link individual behavior to organizational contexts. By examining both active representation and symbolic representation at both the individual and organizational level and specifying the different microprocesses of active representation, a series of testable hypotheses are presented. The logic suggests that the concept of critical mass might also be a useful contextual variable to examine other aspects of administrative behavior. Based on the theory, two empirical illustrations from China are presented.

AbstractRepresentation frequently links state politics to policy. Current research, however, overlooks the interplay between bureaucratic and legislative representation and how local representation may be influenced by state policy environments. There is also a need to test current theories of state politics and policy, driven by the study of US federalism, in different national contexts to indicate how general such theories might be and to provide new insights into the study of US politics and policy. This article studies how gender representation and local policy implementation interacts with state environment factors to affect representation outcomes in K–12 education across 28 states in India. The research points to the generalizability of current theories of representation and state politics across national federal contexts, the conditional nature of the influence of bureaucratic representation on state policy implementation, and the need to better understand the interdependence of representation across political institutions.

Through bringing the concept of status distance to representative bureaucracy and diversity management literature, this article develops new hypotheses that can guide future studies on representation and diversity in public organizations. First, including status distance brings consideration of the tensions that minority representation creates between integration within the workforce and the pressures on minority bureaucrats to actively represent clientele. Second, the way status distance plays out in the interaction of bureaucrats with co-workers and citizen-clients depends on characteristics of the national and organizational environment and type of service.

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.

This study examines gender differences in leadership behaviors and whether leadership training would have different effects on leadership behaviors by gender. Using data from several hundred managers of welfare and financial agencies in Denmark, we first investigate whether leadership behaviors differ between female and male leaders. After that, we conducted a year-long field experiment with managers to examine how female and male leaders respond to leadership training interventions. In general, female managers improve more from leadership training even though leadership scores for female leaders were higher before training.