Measuring power and presence: Bureaucratic representation in the American states

This article introduces a new measure of bureaucratic representation that p rovides a more complete view of a demographic group's potential to be effec tively represented by its members in a bureaucracy. It does so by combining information about a group's overall presence in the bureaucracy (penetrati on) with information that reflects its distribution over the hierarchy (str atification). Specifically, we focus on how groups are distributed in the r egular (i.e., career) bureaucratic hierarchies of American state government s. By comparing our measure to the most frequently used measure of represen tation (the penetration ratio), we demonstrate that it successfully capture s both presence and stratification information, and thereby it offers an im proved tool for analyzing representation in bureaucratic hierarchies.