Allison’s Model III and the theory of representative bureaucracy represent two of the better known and most widely employed bureaucratic politics frameworks. Although it is hard to underestimate Allison’s contribution, it clearly falls short of a generally applicable theoretical framework. Allison’s Model III is likely to continue to find gainful employment in structuring administrative studies, but evidence has steadily mounted that it is overambitious in scope and underperforming in practice. Although having a considerably older lineage than Model
III, the theory of representative bureaucracy in one sense remains curiously under employed.
The basic model is parsimonious, and its predictive hypotheses are intuitively easy to grasp. Simply stated, the theory argues that a civil service reflecting the diverse interests and values of the community it serves will take those interests into account when exercising its discretionary authority. The validity of the theory is tied to the hypothesis that passive representation will lead to active representation. Even if we acknowledge the difficulties in operationalizing such tests, there are but a handful of published studies squarely aimed at empirically assessing this claim, and these have produced mixed and contradictory results.