How Representative are (Supra)national Bureaucracies? The Case of European Gender Equality Policies

Recent studies suggest that a truly representative bureaucracy requires sufficient overlap in the policy preferences of public administrations (and administrators) and the relevant constituent population. When this overlap is large, the public administration can credibly claim to “represent some group or larger set of social interests” (Saward, 2005: 179; Saward, 2010, 2014), and thereby gains a certain degree of legitimacy. As such, “representativeness in socio-demographic terms would have to be complemented (though not replaced) with representativeness in terms of the policy opinions and preferences” (Murdoch et al., 2016). In this article, we build on this line of argument to assess whether European public bureaucrats at the national and supranational level are de facto representative of their underlying population(s). Our empirical analysis relies on novel survey evidence documenting popular and (supra)national bureaucrats’ understanding of, and preferences towards, gender equality. This allows a unique three-level comparison across supranational bureaucrats, national bureaucrats and the broader public.