Representative bureaucracy in Italy

Representative Bureaucracy has been a salient issue ever since the time Kingsley coined this concept in 1944. However, this has not been the case with Italy’s political-administrative system. By describing the composition of Italian bureaucracy in terms of the main categories associated with the concept of representative bureaucracy (gender, education, social background, geographic origin, etc.), the present paper aims to show how this issue has been almost totally neglected as a political matter within Italy. According to the authors’ main line of argument, the Italian form of ‘representative democracy’ remains somewhat underdeveloped. In fact, while southern Italians remain over-represented to a certain degree, – a fact inherited from the original model – the gender issue has finally been resolved. What is lacking in Italy is a broad awareness of the ethnic and religious issues, due to the fact that immigration has only become a significant issue in the last 15 years.