Representative bureaucracy and impartial policing
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Author | Sharon Gilad,Momi Dahan |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12681 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Representative bureaucracy and impartial policing
Sharon Gilad | Momi Dahan
Department of Political Science and the
Federmann School of Public Policy and
Governance, Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Israel
Correspondence
Sharon Gilad, Department of Political Science
and the Federmann School of Public Policy
and Governance, Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905,
Israel.
Email: sharon.gilad@mail.huji.ac.il
Abstract
Representative bureaucracy theory expects minority
bureaucrats to advance the interests of minority citizens.
Yet, little attention has been given to the variation in the
acceptability, incentives and risks of representation across
bureaucratic domains. Analysis of over two million police
vehicle stops from four different US departments reveals
that African American police officers do not treat African
Americans preferentially, yet they mitigate existing racial
disparities in policing. Compared with White officers, Afri-
can Americans seem less disposed to use their discretion.
They are disinclined to search drivers, yet inclined to cite
them, displaying comparatively low disparities across social
groups. These findings extend to pure traffic violations, and
are robust to entropy balancing reweighting. We provision-
ally attribute African American police officers' impartial
policing style to their compelling need to display their per-
formance, and avoid blame, amidst intra-organizational
pressures and risks ensuing from the political salience of the
police's clash with minority communities.
1|INTRODUCTION
Representative bureaucracy theory suggests that minorities within the public sector, given their early socialization, have
first-hand appreciation for the grievances of minority citizens, and thereby greater value and attitudinal affinity with these
groups (Sowa and Selden 2003; Riccucci and Meyers 2004; Bradbury and Kellough 2008; Andersen 2017; Stazyk
et al. 2017; Meier 2019). Consequently, as far as two minimal domain-specific conditions are fulfilled—minority issues are
salient and bureaucrats' structural discretion is relatively broad—minority bureaucrats are expected to pursue a ‘minority
representative role’(Selden et al. 1998), and to treat minority citizens preferentially so as to counterbalance their overall
deprivation (Meier 2019). Such translation of ‘passive’minority representation in the bureaucracy into ‘active’outcomes
has been evidenced in several domains and countries, yet most consistently by studies of the American education system
(e.g., Meier and Stuart 1992; Meier 1993; Meier et al. 1999; Dee 2004, 2005; Pitts 2005; Atkins and Wilkins 2013;
Received: 6 December 2019 Revised: 18 March 2020 Accepted: 18 May 2020
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12681
Public Admin. 2021;99:137–155. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 137
Nicholson-Crotty et al. 2016; Andersen 2017). However, in American policing, on which we focus here, despite its signifi-
cance for minority communities and police officers' discretion, the effect of representation has proved inconsistent, with
some studies suggesting that it even exacerbates minority discrimination (e.g., Brown and Frank 2006; Wilkins and Wil-
liams 2008, 2009; Anbarci and Lee 2014; but see Close and Mason 2006, 2007; Theobald and Haider-Markel 2008; and
Hong 2017, in relation to the UK).
The divergent consequences of minority representation across domains indicates that we need to look beyond issue
salience and discretion. Specifically, bureaucratic settings may vary in the range of acceptable roles and practices from
which bureaucrats construe their professional identity. In some policy and organizational domains, such as American edu-
cation, preferential treatment of disadvantaged minority citizens may be perceived as a legitimate professional practice in
pursuit of equal opportunities. In such domains, non-minorities sometimes, albeit to a lesser extent, also seek to promote
minority clients (Selden et al. 1998; Jilke and Tummers 2018). Conversely, in other contexts, bureaucrats who espouse a
minority representative role may be tagged as biased, unprofessional or simply as failing to attain the organization's pri-
mary goals. Moreover, as a visible and carefully scrutinized group, minority bureaucrats' discretion may be uniquely con-
strained by organizational performance pressures and risks (Kanter 1977).
In American policing, the centrality of the police's crime fighting role negates preferential treatment of minority citi-
zens by minority officers. Moreover, the political debate and societal anxiety surrounding police-race relations, which acti-
vates African American officers' concern for their communities, renders these officers organizationally visible and a threat,
by their very presence, to institutionalized practices of racial disparity. This salience exposes African American officers to
heightened performance pressures and risks of disciplinary action, ensuing from both managers and colleagues (Lersch
and Mieczkowski 2000; Dowler 2005; Gustafson 2008; Hassell and Brandl 2009; Rojek and Decker 2009; Stroshine and
Brandl 2011). We offer that African American officers' logical response to these perils is to mitigate blame by closely fol-
lowing legal and departmental rules (cf. Portillo and DeHart-Davis 2009; Hood 2010; Portillo 2012), which precludes rep-
resentation via preferential treatment of minority citizens. This approach, nonetheless, fulfils the fundamental aims of
representative bureaucracy, since it mitigates existing racial disparities in policing.
Conceptually, drawing on police culture research, we typify African American officers' rule-boun d behaviour as involv-
ing a ‘non-aggressive’and ‘non-selective’policing style, which contrasts with the American police's traditional ‘aggressive
and selective’style (Brown 1988; Worden 1995; Paoline et al. 2000; Paoline 2003, 2004; Oberfield 2010, 2012). Non-
aggressive, meaning officers' high threshold for action on a suspicion that a crime has been committed, and thereby disincli-
nation to use discretionary stop and search powers on purely speculative grounds; non-selective, that is officers' enfor ce-
ment of all legal norms, including traffic-safety infractions, as opposed to selective prioritization of felony crimes.
Empirically, our article makes sense of the behavioural patterns of police officers during more than two million
individual-level observations of police vehicle stops across four different police departments and locations in the US.
We show that African American police officers, compared with other officers, are restrained and impartial in their
use of vehicle stops as a means for crime investigation: they are less inclined to aggressively search drivers in pursuit
of evidence for crime, more likely to non-selectively issue citations for traffic-safety violations, and less inclined to
differentiate between African American and White citizens. This pattern is robust to entropy balancing reweighting
(Hainmueller 2012) and to alternative model specifications that are intended to account for possible selection biases
in police officers' allocation to geographical areas and time shifts. Moreover, we show that it extends to circum-
stances wherein police officers stop drivers for clear traffic violations, indicating that our findings transcend diversity
in officers' initial decision to stop drivers for solid versus trivial violations (cf. Epp et al. 2014, 2017).
2|HOW DOES THE INSTITUTIONAL SETTING OF AMERICAN POLICING
SHAPE THE CONSEQUENCES OF MINORITY REPRESENTATION?
Representative bureaucracy theory suggests that the translation of passive into active representation is conditioned
by bureaucratic discretion and the salience of a policy domain for minority communities. In the case of police vehicle
138 GILAD AND DAHAN
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