How do distant and privileged citizen audiences perceive agencies with distinctive reputations when their agency leader is representative of vulnerable citizens?

Authors: André Dantas Cabral & Alketa Peci Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (EBAPE), Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Bureaucratic reputation and symbolic representation influence citizens` expectations toward bureaucratic agencies. Research has already demonstrated their effects for vulnerable citizen audiences in direct interactions with bureaucratic agencies but tends to overlook audience heterogeneity. So how distant & privileged citizens` audiences perceive agencies with distinctive reputations when their agency leader is representative of vulnerable citizens? We rely on a survey experiment and qualitative interviews with privileged citizens of Rio de Janeiro, evaluating police and public schools located in a favela, whose black, poor and geographically segregated residents are marked by tenuous relationships with public agencies. Findings support direct effects of both representation and reputation. Compared to a vulnerable citizens audience, we observe higher representational effects and less pronounced reputational effect for privileged & distant audience members. Higher representational effects are attributed to a representative leader knowledgeability of vulnerable citizens and their relations with bureaucratic agencies. Less pronounced reputational effects reflect the nature of an uninformed audience that doesn`t interact directly with such agencies.