Representative Bureaucracy and Policy Tools

Abstract

This article examines how racial and ethnic representation influences the tools that public officials use in designing policy. We use Schneider and Ingram’s policy tools framework to empirically test how racial and ethnic representation affects student discipline outcomes in a sample of Georgia public schools. We find that schools with balanced racial and ethnic representation are more likely to adopt learning-oriented discipline policies, whereas those with imbalanced representation are more likely to implement sanction-oriented policies. The results demonstrate that representation is an important lever in policy design, with broad social and political consequences that extend beyond the immediate organization.