Representative bureaucracy theory posits that shared identities between bureaucrats and service users can foster more equitable outcomes. Yet, little is known about how this mechanism functions in the European, where equal treatment norms coexist with persistent barriers to social rights for mobile citizens. This article investigates how bureaucrats’ social identities—gender, migration background, and experiences of discrimination—influence not only patterns of representation but broader discretionary behavior toward European mobile claimants. Using original conjoint survey experiments with over 2,400 public workers in Denmark, Ireland, Spain, and Switzerland, the study analyses decision patterns in the allocation of social benefits. The findings reveal that bureaucrats do not systematically favor claimants who share their socio-demographic characteristics, offering only modest evidence for active representation. Instead, female bureaucrats and those with a migration background demonstrate more neutral and equitable decision-making, particularly toward claimants with greater vulnerability, such as limited language proficiency or shorter residency. Personal experiences of discrimination have a limited and inconsistent effect on decisions, indicating that structural social identities more strongly reduce bias than individual experiences. These results suggest that active representation in the European context may be is less about explicit favoritism toward similar groups and more about reducing stereotypical or exclusionary judgments toward marginalized populations. The findings also highlight that passive representation may foster broader organizational cultures of inclusion, moderating the extent of bias in discretionary decisions.
