Staff of the People? Assessing Progress in Descriptive Representation under the Obama Administration

Over the past few decades, presidents have made some increasingly noticeable efforts to fill their administrations with a higher number of minorities. Though not yet fully representative of the general public, such advances in descriptive representation are a sign of progressive change occurring within the executive branch, with positive potential implications for the state of representative democracy and public policy. In this article, I survey the current state of descriptive representation under the Obama presidency and the extent to which the president's policy agenda has substantively addressed the needs of historically underrepresented groups. Descriptively, I find that President Barack Obama has been symbolically progressive in adopting an inclusive approach for staffing the upper echelons of his administration. However, concerning substantive policy outcomes, I find that although the Obama administration has made some major strides concerning women's issues, its record concerning the needs and expectations of the African American and Latino communities has been more mixed.