At the Margins: Budget Cuts and Representative Bureaucracy

• In Event: Representative Bureaucracy

Abstract

Representative bureaucracy theory argues that having bureaucrats who mirror clients’ identities would bring benefits to society (Mosher 1968). Literature in representative bureaucracy has found representation at both street-level and management level in various policy and agency contexts (Keiser et al. 2002; Carroll et al. 2019). Minority managers and bureaucrats are able to carry out active representation to improve minority clients’ outcomes (Keiser et al., 2002). Minority clients could also change their behaviors because of the existence of minority bureaucrats who represent them, which is the symbolic representation (Riccucci et al., 2016).
For managers and bureaucrats, they must work within organizational constraints and environmental turbulence. However, both of the organizational conditions could have effects on clients’ outcomes. In this paper, we explore how representation overcomes the negative effects of environmental turbulence in unfavorable situations. Environmental turbulence contributes to organizational challenges and uncertainties. Maintaining organizational performance under turbulence is difficult but crucial for managers as they maintain organizational stability and continue offering services to clients. Budget cuts, as one aspect of environmental turbulence, could have huge effects on organizational performance. Financial resources are important to organizational abilities. When organizations cut funds, this can lead to decreases in performance and agency morale.
By applying the representative bureaucracy theory into K-12 education, we explore how street-level and managerial level bureaucrats overcome the negative effects of environmental turbulence. We use the data from the 2011 Texas Middle Management Survey, which covers a large number of diverse school districts within Texas, and the Texas Education Agency for the outcome variables. There are two critical advantages of using this dataset. First, this dataset contains the essential theoretical concepts we need for this study—managers by race, bureaucrats by race, the organizational performance by race, and budgetary cut information. Second, this wave of the survey was implemented shortly after the Great Recession. The situation can be comparable to today with the economic effects of pandemic and offer valuable insights. Our findings in this paper suggest that Latino students perform better when schools are experiencing high-level budget cuts if they have the same race school principals. We also see an improved performance of black and Latino students if the percentage of same-race teachers maintains at a level when schools experience high-level budget cuts.

Authors

• Xiaoyang Xu, American University

• Carla M. Flink, American University

• Angel Luis Molina, Arizona State University