What do you want from government? Do you prefer public services to be delivered in the right manner or by the right person – i.e. by a public employee that represents you? Studies on representative bureaucracy have accumulated theoretical and empirical insights about how racial and gender attributes of bureaucrats and citizens influence both the performance of bureaucracies and citizens’ perceptions of those performances. Yet the existing literature presents shortcomings that justify further studies. First, previous research shows sharply contradictory results. On the one hand, better represented administrative bodies, particularly in terms of race and gender, can lead to more positive outcomes for the represented citizen groups, such as minority citizens being better treated by minority police officers (e.g., Hong 2017), higher test scores for girls with female teachers (e.g., Meier 2019). On the other hand, some studies present opposite findings, such as an increase in racial profiling in police divisions with more minority officers (Wilkins & Williams 2008). Second, research on representative bureaucracy has predominantly focused on Anglo-Saxon contexts. We aim to contribute to this literature by exploring a highly politicized cleavage in the Basque Country, Spain: the language spoken by the public official: Basque vis-à-vis Spanish. We explore how citizens evaluate efficiency vis-à-vis representativeness in the Basque public sector employing two vignette experiments describing hypothetical scenarios in health care and law enforcement.