Linking Passive and Active Representation by Gender: The Case of Child Support Agencies Vicky M. Wilkins University of Georgia Lael R. Keiser University of Missouri–Columbia ABSTRACT Does it matter whether political institutions are representative in terms of the characteristics of the people who work there? We explore this question by empirically examining whether passive representation leads to active representation in child support–enforcement bureaucracies for women. Our findings support the hypothesis that passive representation leads to active representation for women in gendered policy areas like child support. Furthermore, the link between passive and active representation only exists when the distributional consequences of the policy directly benefit women as a class. Does it matter whether the public workplace is diverse? A rich literature exists that explores this question, some of which has found that passive representation leads to active representation for race in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Hindera 1993), education (Meier and Stewart 1992; Meier, Stewart, and England 1989), and the Farmers Home Administration (Selden 1997). Although with less empirical support across different agencies, evidence exists that a link between passive and active representation exists for women as well (Keiser et al. 2002; but see Hindera 1993; Selden 1997). The question remaining for scholars is not whether a link exists between passive and active representation but, rather, under which conditions the link exists. In this article we test the hypothesis that the link between passive and active representation for women only occurs when the policy area in question directly benefits women as a class and when the policy area is gendered (Meier 1993). By doing so, we contribute to the creation of a theory of representative bureaucracy. THEORY OF REPRESENTATIVE BUREAUCRACY Public bureaucracies are tasked with distributing the outputs of public policies. The theory of representative bureaucracy concerns how the demographic characteristics of bureaucrats Address correspondence to the corresponding author at vwilkins@uga.edu. doi:10.1093/jopart/mui023 Advance Access publication on December 16, 2004 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory ª 2004 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc.; all rights reserved. JPART 16:87–102 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jpart/article/16/1/87/886931 by guest on 18 June 2022