Understanding Whether Representative Bureaucracy and Racial Resentment Impact Public Perceptions of the Distributive Justice of Government Programs
通过调查实验，研究政府雇员的种族多样性如何影响公众对政策结果公平性的感知，并考察种族怨恨水平对这一关系的作用。
Within the representative bureaucracy literature, scholars argue that public perceptions of government will improve when their government looks like them. In particular, this study focuses on how the public perceives the fairness of policy outcomes, measured as distributive justice. We test this through a survey experiment that examines how perceptions of distributive justice are affected by the racial diversity of government employees. Respondents are presented with a vignette about grants allocated to small businesses, and then provided information about the racial diversity of agency employees. We further examine whether levels of racial resentment impact the relationship between diversity in government and the perceived distributive justice of policy outcomes. Racial resentment, frequently used in political science as a proxy for levels of prejudice, is included because reactions to information about race and government policy are likely to shape perceptions about the legitimacy of government action and views on representative bureaucracy. The experiment results indicate racial representation in government matters for Whites, and these effects vary by expressed levels of racial resentment. In contrast, distributive justice perceptions of non-White respondents are not changed by information on racial diversity within government agencies and do not vary by levels of racial resentment.