Limit Tests: Sociodemographic Representation in Public Organizations

Bureaucratic institutions are a critical yet often underappreciated nexus of democratic legitimacy. However, public agencies frequently fail to represent key constituencies of the American public, significantly influencing citizens' attitudes toward governing institutions and challenging effective governance. Research suggests that improving sociodemographic representation within political institutions can reinforce institutional support and citizen trust through symbolic processes and promote equitable policy outcomes through actions of bureaucrats from historically excluded groups. Despite these insights, past research is divided on if, how, and when descriptive or passive representation leads to beneficial symbolic or active effects. While the existing body of representative bureaucracy theory offers valuable insights, it could benefit from broader interdisciplinary engagement with sociodemographic representation and social identity. This dissertation incorporates a cross-disciplinary framework to elucidate the cognitive processes underlying individuals' perceptual and attitudinal shifts and offers a nuanced understanding of the factors conditioning the relationship between enhanced diversity and representational effects. Chapter two examines whether regulatory agencies, typically less visible than service agencies, can manifest the dynamics of symbolic representation. It explores: (1) Can symbolic representation be identified in a non-service regulatory context? (2) Are DEI demands stronger within equity-focused organizational domains? (3) Are concerns about organizational diversity stronger among historically underrepresented respondents? Using experiments embedded in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), results indicate that symbolic representation can be identified in regulatory contexts, but DEI preferences vary by agency type and organization. Service agency treatments positively correlated with DEI priorities among White respondents, whereas identity-salient cues were more impactful for non-White respondents. Chapter three explores how symbolic effects of representation vary across federal agencies, conditioned by the institutional ethos of each agency. A conjoint experiment revealed that the impact of religious representation is most pronounced among religious minorities, with some evidence of a broader contagion effect. Symbolic impacts differ systematically across institutional domains, with more pronounced effects in agencies with histories of discrimination. The final chapter examines minority administrators’ influence over policy implementation in state-level environmental agencies using a "critical actor" framework. A novel state-level dataset combined with public reports on punitive enforcement patterns tests whether executive-level racial representation increases oversight in counties with higher non-white populations. This contributes to environmental justice discourse and the role of representation in promoting equitable environmental protection. These findings caution against theoretical frameworks that essentialize the perceptions and values of marginalized individuals, minimize their autonomy, or oversimplify the intersections of their identities and experiences.