Bureaucratic Representation and Distributional Equity: An Analysis of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

• In Event: Insights on Street-Level Bureaucracy

Abstract

As the public sector workforce has become increasingly diverse, bureaucratic representation has profound implications for equitable access to public services across social groups. On the one hand, concerns have emerged regarding distributional equity, specifically the extent to which bureaucrats prioritize representation (e.g., advocating for co-identity clients regardless of their equity status) over equity (e.g., focusing on the needs of the underserved rather than the overserved). Referred to as the representation-equity tradeoff, this tension suggests that the marginal benefits of bureaucratic representation may diminish as a group approaches parity, ultimately reaching a point of zero additional benefit at and beyond the equity point. On the other hand, research shows that minority bureaucrats may act as equity-conscious advocates, supporting both their co-identity clients and other disadvantaged groups through a mutually representative role. Minority representation within government can generate spillover effects, whereby advocacy extends to other disadvantaged groups, and contagion effects, whereby the presence of minority bureaucrats influences how non-minority administrators engage with minority clients. While these dynamics suggest that the benefits of bureaucratic representation extend beyond a specific minority group, an important question remains: How are these benefits distributed across groups? Despite its theoretical and practical significance, the representative bureaucracy literature has yet to fully explore distributional equity—a concept shaped not only by the balance between representation and equity, but also by the spillover and contagion effects.

Focusing on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), this study examines whether and how bureaucratic representation effectively and equitably closes the benefit gap across different ethnoracial groups. Specifically, it tests whether: (1) minority administrators ascribe more policy benefits to their own group and other minority groups alike when a group’s current policy outcomes are more distant from the perceived equity level (i.e., when the participation gap is larger), and (2) such allocations diminish or cease when a group’s policy outcomes approach or exceed the perceived equity level. With the 2006-2019 county-year and state-year data, our empirical analysis focuses on the relationship between minority representation in state/local governments and SNAP participation of minorities. Policy benefits are measured with the county-level SNAP participation rate by race/ethnicity (estimated percentage of people who are eligible for SNAP who participate in the program in a given county). Bureaucratic representation is measured with (1) the percentage of minority (blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans) administrators working full-time in the public welfare role in state/local governments and (2) the proportional representation ratio calculated as the percentage of minority administrators relative to the percentage of minority population. To assess disparities, we construct a participation gap for each group, defined as the difference between the group’s participation rate and the overall average across all groups (i.e., the grand mean), with negative values indicating underserved status and positive values indicating overserved status. We test the interactions between bureaucratic representation and the participation gap.

Authors

• Jiaqi Liang, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Sanghee Park, Indiana University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author