This study, which won the Leonard D. White award, is the most systematic test to date of the concept of representative bureaucracy. Selden tests the relationship between the demographic representativeness of district office staffs and lending decisions in the Farmers Home Administration's Rural Housing Loans Program. In fleshing out the implications of representative bureaucracy, the book makes an important contribution to the debates on bureaucratic power and illuminates the tensions underlying the assumptions of bureaucratic neutrality and affirmative action.