Tag: representative bureaucracy

Manifesting Symbolic Representation through Collaborative Policymaking

by Jack Mewhirter, Danielle McLaughlin, & Brian Calfano

Representation is crucial to any collaborative governance arrangement. The makeup of those who participate in collaborative forums impacts not just who “wins” and “loses” in the policymaking process, but also how the public perceives participating organizations. Generally speaking, if citizens feel that their interests and incentives are being represented by those participating in a collaboration, they will hold more positive beliefs toward those organizations involved, a phenomenon referred to as “symbolic representation.” Conversely, a perceived lack of representation can potentially engender distrust and negative perceptions toward participating organizations.

The inclusion of civil society organizations in collaborative policymaking is crucial to making citizens feel represented in collaborative forums. Compared to, for example, business and government stakeholders, civil society organizations tend to be more embedded in local communities and thus more responsive to their wants and needs. Thus, we argue that collaborative policymaking forums that feature high participation from civil society organizations should produce a symbolic effect toward participating organizations for citizens aware of this representation.

We test this hypothesis in the context of the Collaborative Settlement Agreement (or CA) governing policing in Cincinnati, Ohio. Established following the controversial killing of a Black teenager in 2001, the CA created a collaborative forum that brought together the Cincinnati Police Department and civil society organizations to address concerns around policing. The CA is a good case study for our hypothesis because civil society organizations have been well-represented and very active within the forum, using it to bring about numerous reforms to department practices.

To capture respondents most representative of Cincinnati’s urban core, we conducted surveys at several community events in the city of Cincinnati between June and September 2017. We asked respondents about their familiarity with the CA and their subsequent feelings toward the Cincinnati Police Department, anticipating that the two will be positively related (i.e., those who are more knowledgeable about the CA will feel more warmly towards the police). We also asked a number of demographic and personal history questions (e.g., regarding race, age, income, any interactions with police, etc.) to see how such variables might correlate with respondents’ knowledge and attitudes. 

And indeed, we found a strong positive relationship between knowledge about the CA and attitudes towards the police. In our survey we also asked respondents to indicate whether they thought that Cincinnati police officers “looked like” them – otherwise referred to as “passive representation” – and found that those who agreed also felt more positively about the police. Other variables that showed positive correlations included age, employment, and income. 

Our study demonstrates the important role that representation in collaborative policymaking forums can play in how people feel about those who participate in it. The case of the Collaborative Agreement in Cincinnati particularly illustrates how the inclusion of civil society organizations can contribute to feelings of symbolic representation, an important finding in the context of police-community relationships. Our findings point to the need to involve groups with close community ties in collaborative policymaking endeavors, as this will go a long way to securing buy-in and coproduction from the broader population. Our findings also reinforce that passive representation – having participants in forums who “look like you” – can bolster symbolic representation. While the CA is a powerful example of inclusion and representation done well, further studies need to be done to see whether collaborative forums that don’t feature robust involvement from civil society organizations are indeed looked upon less favorably. Furthermore, our study took for granted that citizens feel represented by civil society organizations, but this assumption requires empirical testing as well. 

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Mewhirter, Jack, Danielle McLaughlin, and Brian Calfano. 2024. “Manifesting Symbolic Representation Through Collaborative Policymaking.” Policy Studies Journal, 52(2): 283–318. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12525.

About the Authors

Jack Mewhirter is an Associate Professor in the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee. His research assesses the origins, implementation, and impacts of public policies meant to address complex social problems. This work is done in various contexts, including environmental, health and policing policy. 

Danielle M. McLaughlin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Kent State University. Her research focuses on the impact of institutions in solving collective action problems, mainly in the context of environmental policy issues.

Brian Calfano is a Professor at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on media and politics, religion and politics, and community engagement with local government. 

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Race, Representation, and Policy Attitudes in U.S. Public Schools

by Lael A. Keiser & Donald P. Haider-Markel

Tragic events around the country highlight the disproportionate ill-treatment of African Americans within the criminal justice system, the high levels of distrust African Americans have for the police and political institutions in general, and the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in public institutions. In response, some have sought to increase the passive or descriptive representation of minorities within law enforcement, higher education, and public schools, with the hope that doing so will improve the treatment of under-represented groups and enhance positive attitudes toward institutions and the policies they implement. 

However, different schools of thought exist about whether increasing representation of minorities is a zero-sum game (where increasing representation of one group reduces it for others) and whether it worsens attitudes of historical majorities. Further, while scholars have discussed two major perspectives – the mirror image and the institutional democracy hypotheses – few have measured passive representation in ways that fit these two perspectives or examined their implications for both minority and majority groups. 

According to the theory of symbolic representation, greater passive representation can evoke feelings of inclusiveness and of being represented which, in turn, impacts public attitudes toward policy and public institutions. Two distinct and competing mechanisms connect this passive representation with citizen attitudes. One argument, described as the “mirror image” hypothesis, is that a person’s support for government institutions depends, in part, on whether people within those institutions “look like” that person. The institutional symbol of democracy perspective, on the other hand, posits that support for public institutions depends on whether the institution reflects the population as a whole. 

In our paper, we test both of these hypotheses by examining passive representation in public schools and attitudes about school discipline using different measures of passive representation that better map onto existing theory. Using individual-level survey data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), we analyze a sample of 5,750 white, Black, and Hispanic 10th-grade students across 453 high schools who were asked their perspectives on the fairness of school rules and whether they felt the rules were implemented in a uniform manner across all students. We utilize three distinct measures of passive representation, as illustrated below.

Our results were more consistent with the institutional symbol hypothesis, where more diverse school personnel corresponded with more positive attitudes about how institutions implement policy among white students. White students in schools with a higher proportion of minority teachers (and therefore fewer white teachers) were more likely to think punishment is fair than were white students in schools with less passive representation for minorities. This finding provides evidence that increasing the number of minority teachers may not always be considered a zero-sum context.  However, we do find evidence in support of the mirror image hypothesis for Black students who were more likely to think punishment was fairer when their percentage representation was greater but we find no evidence that attitudes were affected by representation measured by diversity or proportional representation.  We find inconsistent results for Hispanic students. 

However, our results suggest some important caveats. Though our analysis indicated that white students’ attitudes toward fairness were greater in schools with higher percentage representation of minorities, this was largely only the case in schools with smaller minority student populations. We found no evidence that white students’ attitudes varied with differences in proportional representation. This suggests that the positive link between minority representation and whites’ attitudes was strongest when in schools with relatively small minority student shares.

And perhaps more importantly, our results highlight how the use of different measures of representation, as well as of distinct statistical models, can lead to dissimilar results. This calls attention to the assumptions researchers implicitly make about theory when they choose measures of representation and calls us to both specify the theoretical mechanisms at play and to match them to theory so that we can improve our understanding of how passive representation truly affects policy attitudes. 

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Keiser, Lael R., Donald P. Haider-Markel, and Rajeev Darolia. 2022. “Race, Representation, and Policy Attitudes in U.S. Public Schools.” Policy Studies Journal, 50(4): 823–848. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12443

About the Authors

Lael R. Keiser is professor and director of the Harry S. Truman School of Government and Public Affairs. Her research and teaching focuses on the policy implementation and the administration of public programs. She serves on the editorial boards of Public Administration Review and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

Donald P. Haider-Markel is Professor of political science at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching are focused on the representation of group interests in politics and policy, and the dynamics between public opinion, political behavior, and public policy.

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