THERE ARE relatively few Caribbean studies (Debiprahad & Budhram, 1987; Bissessar, 2002) that have examined participation levels of different ethnic groups in the public sector, in the private sector or in civil society, generally, or have explored whether ethnic dominance has connectivity with public ethnic participation; indeed, in addition to this study.* And the paucity of ethnic data and information in previous and current administrations on structural diversity as it relates to participation levels in the public sector is unfortunate, because it is this type of data and information that would help to ease perceptions of ethnic mistrust and ethnic insecurity in Guyana.

The research questions which focused this study are: To what extent does poverty influence ethnic participation in the public sector? How do the pre-labour market factors (education and examination outcomes) impact ethnic participation? Given the persisting perceptions of racial division, what are the participation levels of Africans and Indians in the public sector? Do these participation levels add up to a representative bureaucracy that enhances responsiveness to the entire polity? And what are the implications of ethnic participation levels and a representative bureaucracy in a multiethnic society?

Examining ethnic participation, with the view to determine whether or not a representative bureaucracy in the public service exists, is in itself a method to study ethnic imbalance; ‘passive’ representation establishes the extent to which public service personnel have similar demographics as the people they represent (Meier and Joseph, 1992).

The notion of a representative bureaucracy is a strategy to enhance responsiveness to the entire polity. Donald Kingsley provided currency to the term ‘representative bureaucracy’ in 1949. In fact, his general position purported to be that the civil service should have representatives from the economic class, caste, region or religion, in proportion to their representations in the population. If this were the case in any society, would public service personnel not represent their sectional interests, instead of the interests of the public service as a whole? And if this happens, should we not conclude that the public service is unresponsive to the needs of the entire polity?

Nonetheless, Subramanium in a 1967 study found flaws with this notion of representative bureaucracy because the children of the middle class occupied more than 80% of the civil service positions in many countries, in spite of their stage of economic development. And the U.S. Federal Civil Service had a strong middle class, but it was representative because it was largely a middle-class society. However, its responsiveness to the society at large meant that its civil service rose above class barriers. And he concluded that a numerically representative bureaucracy might be impractical, and even if representativeness became a reality, its outcomes might be undesirable. But determining representativeness and responsiveness of the public service may provide insights into ethnic imbalance in Guyana.

A Zambian study (1974) showed that an ethnic group did not have to depend on representation in a bureaucracy as a resource to promote its ethnic interests. The Zambian study implied that this might be the case because a person within the bureaucracy faced three constraints: the job position’s authority, requirements pertaining to explicit policy options, and criteria for career mobility. And the study also found that the social identities of government personnel did not influence their behaviours and priorities.

The Zambian study dismissed ethnicity, a form of social identity, as a factor influencing policy. A possible implication for this dismissal may be that, on the whole, public service professionals would function in accordance with their public service expectations and rules. Again, assuming that this case represents the norm, then ‘tokenism’ becomes a misguided concept because it is the ‘professionalism’ and not ‘social identity’ that drive a person’s behaviour in this context.

This Zambian study brings us to the quality of policy decisions in the public service, where discretionary power of administrators is the evaluative mechanism, now a constant in public administration; nonetheless, discretionary power can become detrimental to providing public service to the entire polity.

Sowa and Selden (2003)  noted that in this context, a critical task to prevent any damaging consequence is to make sure that discretionary power does not translate to political power, but to administrative responsibility; they found that administrators with high discretion representing minority interests would present results that favour those minority interests. And that discretionary power can be the connectivity between passive and active representation. Apparently, the issue is not so much representativeness or ethnic imbalance in the public bureaucracies, but more responsiveness of public bureaucracies to the entire polity.

*Misir, P., 2010. Racial Ethnic Imbalance in Guyana Public Bureaucracies: The Tension Between Exclusion and representation. Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ontario, and Lampeter, Wales, U.K.: The Edwin Mellen Press.