Why the Socio-demographic background of International Civil Servants Matters: A Preliminary Analysis of the Importance of UN Bureaucrats’ Nationality

There is a growing interest in International Bureaucracies within the academic community. However, the staff of these international bureaucracies i.e. international bureaucrats remain overlooked in this literature. This paper aims to fill this gap by shedding light on the importance of the socio-demographic background of United Nations bureaucrats, in particular their nationality. To answer this question, I use the theory of representative bureaucracy that puts forward that the more the public workforce mirror its political constituency in terms of socio-demographic attributes, the more it will be responsive, legitimate and performing. This paper adopts a mixed-methods design. First, with descriptive statistics, I present the patterns of passive representation in the UN Secretariat for the last ten years (2007-2016). The findings show that hierarchy has a significant impact on the representation of nationalities, confirming previous studies in the field. Developing countries are under-represented in upper-level positions. In the second part, through 15 original semi-structured interviews with Member States’ representatives, I demonstrate that the nationality of UN bureaucrats matters in relation to policy-making but also symbolically.