Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In public management, discrimination is assessed in terms of citizens’ access to public goods and services. From this perspective, emphasis is placed upon the public manager and the administrative structures they work within as sources of discrimination. Yet, citizens are also likely to discriminate in their dealings with public officials. This perspective on discrimination has gone unaddressed by public management scholars, yet is significant in that it likely makes it much more difficult for public managers on the receiving end to do their job. In turn, this form of discrimination has implications for the representativeness of public organizations.

The objective of this study is to help shed light on this important issue. Our assessment is guided by two research questions:

1. Do white citizens hold public organizations led by black public managers to a different performance standard than those led by white public managers?
2. Will greater exposure to performance information help mitigate this bias, if present?

To explore these questions we designed two 2 by 2 survey experiments where we vary the race of the public manager (white versus black) and the level of performance information exposure (high versus low). The first survey experiment is carried out in a context of negative performance information (n = 800) and the second in a context of positive performance information (n = 800). In the negative performance information study, we found increased exposure to negative performance information resulted in more negative performance evaluations of public organizations led by black public managers (relative to white public managers) and strengthened preferences to punish black public managers (relative to white public managers). Conversely, in the positive performance information study, we found no evidence of racial bias in participant responses to performance information. Overall, this study offers insight into how innate discrimination on the part of citizens helps shape the representativeness of public organizations. Given the positive performance outputs associated with more diverse, representative public organizations, this offers a new perspective on factors that inhibit attempts to foster greater diversity in public organizations.