Toward a Representative Bureaucracy: The Case of Kenya

대표관료제를 향하여: 케냐의 사례

(Purpose):Theorists of representative bureaucracy focus on a bureaucracy that reflects the demographics of the citizens in terms of social characteristics, thus, leading to bureaucrats carrying out their work based on the interests of social origin groups they represent. This study examines Kenya’s demographic representation in the public service in terms of ethnicity, gender, education, and age; and how these social identities contribute to distributional equity in service delivery and decision making. (Design/methodology/approach):Through the use of representational ratio, this study assesses the trends of recruitment in the public service in the four successive governments of Kenya. The analysis focuses on the bureaucrats within the Cabinet, State Departments, and Parastatals, for these are high level administrative offices with high discretion of decision-making and policy formulation. (Findings): The results indicate that representative bureaucracy, within the Kenyan context, is still a work in progress in terms ethnicity, gender, educational background, and age. Proportional ethnic and gender representation in the bureaucracy which play a primary role in equitable service delivery and responsive policy outputs for the Kenyan public is still lacking, whereas, proportional educational level and age representation depends on the bureaucratic level and social contexts. (Research implications or Originality):Linking representative bureaucracy to proportional representation in terms of social demographics, this study contributes to the understanding that, inclusivity, or lack thereof, has distributive consequences that go beyond the equal opportunity of individual public servants. Thus, for a true and effective representative bureaucracy to be achieved in Kenya, there has to be a political goodwill from the appointing authorities, as well as institutionalized recruitment criteria for better service delivery.