The Perceived Fairness of Active Representation: Evidence From a Survey Experiment

Representative bureaucracy has been investigated empirically and debated normatively, but there exists little evidence about how the general public views representative bureaucracy—especially the legitimacy of active representation. Using a survey experiment, this article explores people's fairness judgments of active representation in two important social and policy contexts: education and gender, and policing and race. Results from an online sample of U.S. adults show that, in the case of education, a female teacher helping a female student was judged to be unfair, with the negative effect mainly coming from the male respondents in the study. In the case of policing, a white officer acting favorably toward a white citizen was judged to be unfair, with the negative effect driven largely by black and Hispanic respondents in the study. Implications for representative bureaucracy theory and research, as well as policy and practice, are discussed.