Active representation and equal treatment: The influence of bureaucrats' social background on discrimination

Abstract

Drawing on street‐level discrimination literature and representative bureaucracy literature, we theorise that bureaucrats from social groups that have a lower status in society are less inclined to discriminate in evaluating citizen‐clients than bureaucrats from higher status groups. We conducted a 2 × 2 vignette survey experiment among bureaucrats in Dutch street‐level organisations (N = 3109) in various organisational domains. The study shows mixed findings. We found evidence for discrimination and so‐called reverse discrimination, revealing that bureaucrats ascribe more competence to higher status citizens, but lower trust at the same time. We did not find bureaucrats' own status background to matter in their biased evaluations.