This study examines the association between the degree to which a police force is ethnically representative of the population it serves and the force’s engagement in racial profiling as a policing tactic. Evidence for this study comes from English and Welsh police forces that implemented force-specific recruitment targets for officers from ethnic minority backgrounds between 2000 and 2010. Results suggest that an increase in the proportion of ethnic minorities on a police force is significantly associated with a decrease in the proportion of ethnic minorities that are stopped and searched by that police force. We also examine whether the effects of representative bureaucracy accrue nonlinearly or dynamically. This analysis failed to produce strong evidence for the “reform fatigue” and “diversity fatigue” hypotheses. Finally, we demonstrate that active representation has primarily occurred in forces in which racial profiling was intensively used as a policing tactic. These findings have implications for the democratic legitimacy of representative bureaucracy.

It is often assumed that a greater level of accountability will positively affect the performance of public organizations; however, this relationship has not been studied extensively in public administration. This study provides quantitative evidence regarding the impact of accountability on organizational performance in the U.S. federal government. Specifically, we examine the association between the levels of organizational performance and accountability in three functions of human resource management (HRM)—staffing, performance evaluation, and compensation—as perceived by employees of public organizations. Further, we test whether the level of autonomy perceived by the employees influences the association between accountability and performance. The findings suggest that the levels of accountability manifested in staffing, performance evaluation, and compensation all positively and significantly affect organizational performance. Moreover, employee autonomy tends to amplify the positive impact of accountability on performance in two HRM functions—staffing and compensation.

This article examines whether an increase in ethnic representativeness at various hierarchical ranks can have different impacts on organizational performance. Data were collected from the British police force that implemented force-specific targets for recruiting officers from ethnic minority backgrounds during 2000–2010. Findings suggest that the benefits of representative bureaucracy are greater when (a) the proportion of minority officers is greater, (b) their average rank is higher in the hierarchical ladder, and (c) they are equally dispersed across different ranks. We also show that representation among street-level officers is a necessary condition for deriving the benefits of representative bureaucracy.