LEARNING FROM SUCCESS: ARE SUCCESSFUL GOVERNMENTS ROLE MODELS?

Do local governments learn from their successful peers when designing public policies? In spite of extensive research on policy diffusion and learning, there is still a lack of studies on how success relates to learning patterns. We address this deficiency by examining which other governments local administrative units draw lessons from. More precisely, we investigate whether public managers learn from the experiences of local governments whose citizens are satisfied with government services. Using a large dyadic dataset on all Swedish municipalities from 2010, we find that senior public managers in local administrations learn from similar local governments and from neighbours. But we also find clear evidence that they learn from local governments whose citizens are pleased with local public services. This indicates that best practices are spread among local governments.     

Environmental cooperation among Swedish local governments

Recent contributions to the literature on collective action towards common pool resources (CPR) hold that for such action to become institutionalized among the principals sharing the CPR, there must develop “trust and a sense of community.” Using data on existing environmental cooperation among Swedish municipalities, as well as data from a 1991 survey of Chief Environmental Inspectors in those municipalities, this article analyzes whether the content, intensity and patterns of the cooperation and contacts across municipal borders do in fact contribute to such a development. Using the results of this analysis, the article ends with a discussion of the odds for a supply of CPR regimes across municipal boundaries in Sweden.     

HOW POLITICIANS AND BUREAUCRATS NETWORK: A COMPARISON ACROSS GOVERNMENTS

Effective public administration relies on the passage of information through interpersonal communication networks. While we have a vast research literature concerning formal structures and roles in organizations, including public agencies and government institutions, we know far less about the flow of information through semiformal, voluntary interactions. In this paper we use a large survey to explore the networking patterns of politicians and bureaucrats and to compare these with the more formal structural attributes of hierarchy and functional specialization. Social network analysis and standard quantitative measures are used to examine which actors are most central in advice and strategic information networks and how this varies across governments. The results suggest that the communication networks of politicians and bureaucrats differ substantially, with politicians being surprisingly peripheral in their patterns of interaction. Differences across governments are also observed with some municipalities being markedly more hierarchical, cross‐organizational, and externally focused in their networking behaviour.     

Assessing electronic service delivery in municipalities: determinants and financial consequences of e-government implementation

In the Netherlands, electronic service delivery has become an important issue in many municipalities. Using the Internet for service delivery is seen as an important element of e-government. Based on 2014–2016 panel data for all Dutch municipalities, we show that there is a large variety among the municipalities in the extent to which they offer their service delivery digitally. By exploring the factors that may explain the differences among the municipalities, some trends can be discerned. Most notably is the strong relationship of e-government adoption with demographic characteristics, such as population, population density and both older age and younger age groups. Remarkably, we did not find an influence of education and income. Finally, we did not observe a relation between municipal allocated costs and level of e-maturity, hereby leaving the question open if and how e-government can lead to cost reductions.     

From Competition to Collaboration: Intergovernmental Economic Development Policy Networks

This study investigates the strategic collaboration among local jurisdictions in the competitive environment: how fragmented jurisdictions in a metropolitan area perceive each other as cooperative partners and what factors influence the establishment of collaborative relationships between them. To answer the research questions, we applied the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework, which assumes that institutional actors behave in ways such that their economic benefits are maximised and risks and costs of collaboration are minimised, and employed the exponential random graph (ERG) model, one of the statistical social network analyses. The results indicate that the physical, political and geographical similarities among municipalities positively influence collaboration among local jurisdictions. In addition, municipalities are more likely to prefer to establish the closed network relationship such as triad–triplet. This study allows to understand the mechanism to establish collaborative behaviour among local jurisdictions for their regional economic development in a metropolitan area.     

Notes on Contributors

In the 1990s, several public corruption scandals were uncovered in Sweden. This article focuses specifically on local corruption, and our purpose is to examine whether a case can be made that problems of public corruption in Swedish municipalities have increased. By applying instruments from the institutional rational choice framework, we reach the conclusion that there are indeed reasons to suspect that retrenchment initiatives and organisational reforms over the last two decades, often labelled ‘new public management’, have increased the risk of corruption. Although hard empirical data do not yet exist, the suspicion that public corruption in Swedish municipalities may have become an increasing problem cannot be disregarded. Hence, we conclude by calling for further empirical research in this field.     

Participatory Initiatives and Political Representation: The Case of Local Councillors in Sweden

The health of political parties and the institutions of representative democracy have been extensively questioned during the last decade due to evidence of a widespread decline in voting turnout, political trust, and party membership as well as identification. An often-proposed, but also often-questioned, strategy to strengthen representative democracy is for political institutions to offer alternative forms of political participation through so-called participatory initiatives. The literature suggests that participatory initiatives will have little impact on representative democracy if no adaptation among political representatives is apparent. This paper explores the consistency between participatory initiatives in Swedish municipalities and the attitudes, practices and role-taking of local councillors, comparing pioneer municipalities where extensive numbers of participatory initatives have been executed vis-à-vis hesitator municipalities where few initiatives have been implemented. The study indicates that local participatory initiatives may stimulate political representation by creating new channels for citizen input and communication between citizens and representatives that are supported by local councillors in the pioneer municipalities. However, the core roles of parties and councillors in representative democracy appear not to be challenged by these initiatives, being similar in both groups of municipalities. The article is concluded by a discussion of the implications of these results for the function of participatory initiatives in local democracy.     

Managers’ Turnover in the Public Sector—The Role of Psychosocial Working Conditions

An important challenge for public organizations is to attract and retain skilled managers. The present study explores how profiles of psychosocial working conditions, assessed by the combination of managerial-specific job demands and job resources, longitudinally predict managers’ turnover intentions and actual turnover in Swedish municipalities. Considerable effects of managers’ psychosocial working conditions on turnover intentions but not on actual turnover were found. Thus, poor working conditions may result in psychologically detached managers in public organizations, which may have considerable and costly effects on both the organizations and the managers, in terms of decreased commitment, performance, and impaired health.     

Electing Mayors with the Supplementary Vote Method: Evidence from Norway

Both Norway and England have used the supplementary vote (SV) method to elect mayors. SV was intended to elect mayors with a broad popular mandate, and deemed easy for voters to use. Previous research on English mayoral elections focusing on the supply side of the elections has found that voters supporting minority candidates with their first vote face difficulties using the optional second vote to choose among the remaining two top-candidates in municipalities where there are many candidates in the race. A close race, on the other hand, seems to give voters a helping hand in making this choice. Drawing on these findings, we link data on the 48 Norwegian mayoral races to survey data to further explore how the supply side of the elections and individual voter resources affect effective voting and use of the optional second vote. We use both standard logistic regression and multi-level models as statistical tools. The result reveals that 27 out the 48 elected mayors in Norway came out as majority winners (more than 50 per cent of the votes). The analysis suggests that the supply side of the elections is of minor importance for whether voters use their second vote or not. The probability of using the second vote is reduced by age, and voters who claim to understand how the electoral system works use the second vote more frequently. The analysis also reveals considerable variation in the number of first and second votes for the top two candidates (effective votes) between municipalities, and the results suggest that this variability may be explained partly by the closeness of the elections. Voters in municipalities with competitive mayoral races are more likely to vote effectively than voters in municipalities with less competitive elections. At the individual level party members are more likely to vote ineffectively.     

Local governance and learning: in search of a conceptual framework

This article proposes a conceptual framework explaining the phenomenon of local governance learning. The framework is grounded in organisational learning, institutional theory and in a case study of local governance practices undertaken in the process of public dispute resolution. Our analysis offers an advancement in the knowledge on governance learning by (1) specifying different types of governance learning, which are linked to the structure of learning not to its motivation, (2) linking the micro level of local governance practices with the mezzo level of organisational structures, and with the institutions regulating governance on the macro level and (3) explicating the difference between learning and institutional change. We introduce the category of astonishment, which we treat as a prerequisite of governance learning. It is defined as a cognitive state caused by a disruption of institutionalised patterns of thinking and behaviour deployed by a (public) organisation to deal with a specific (social) problem.     

Contracting out local road and park services: economic effects and their strategic,contractual and competitive conditions

ABSTRACT

The economic rationale for contracting out local services is increasingly contested by empirical research. This article aims to contribute to this literature, first by scrutinising the economic effects of contracting out in local road and park services and, second, by exploring how characteristics such as markets, contracts, municipal strategies and contracting history influence these outcomes. Drawing on original survey data from Danish municipalities, we find that competitive tendering has on average reduced costs. Further analysis shows that savings are not associated with lower quality, thus indicating that ‘quality shading’ was not taking place. Another finding is that municipalities that repeatedly contract the services experience smaller savings, suggesting that competitive tendering is subject to declining marginal returns. Finally, we find that larger municipalities and those emphasising expenditure cuts realise larger savings, whereas the characteristics of markets and contracts do not seem to explain variations in cost savings.     

Size and Local Democracy: the Case of Czech Municipal Representatives

The municipal structure of the Czech Republic experienced a wave of fragmentation after the fall of the communist regime. As a result, most Czech municipalities today have populations of only a few hundred inhabitants. This situation creates specific conditions for the democratic functioning of local representative bodies. In this paper we focus on two features of Czech local government. First, we deal with electoral competitiveness in Czech municipalities; second, we analyse councillors' accountability to voters, their readiness to stand for re-election and their electoral success in successive elections. Based on an analysis of data on individual candidates and elected councillors in four successive terms, we demonstrate that the willingness to stand for election and re-election does not decrease over time; however, the choice among different candidates is limited in the smallest municipalities. Thus, the data show a reduced willingness to stand for re-election and an extraordinarily high chance of re-election in smaller municipalities. This finding weakens the general assumption about higher accountability of elected officials in small municipalities. On a more general level, we conclude that Czech local government has some features of small political systems with infrequent occurrence of major election conflicts.     

Isomorphic Forces and Professional Soccer Standardizations: Instruments of Governance for Municipal Investments?

This article aims to explain why Danish municipalities usually choose to comply with stadium requirements from the Danish Soccer Association (DBU) even though, in most cases, they do not have the supporter base that could fill the renovated or new stadiums to their capacities. Using institutional theory as a theoretical framework, the article shows that coercive forms of isomorphism are part of the homogenization process leading to the municipalities’ compliance. It also suggests that mimetic forms of isomorphism are present in the sense that municipalities believe that if they comply with these requirements they will strengthen the conditions of their local clubs. In turn, they have encouraged other municipalities to follow suit. In sum, the analysis shows that the central form of governance through standardizations together with isomorphic forces have contributed to a uniformity among the municipalities.     

Citizens’ Initiatives: How Local Governments Fill their Facilitative Role

In the context of drastic cutbacks many Dutch municipalities consider citizens’ initiatives (CIs) as an attractive alternative for municipal policies aimed at improving the livability and safety in neighbourhoods, simultaneously building responsible citizenship. In this paper we combine different theoretical perspectives to analyse the institutional settings in which CIs are being realised, and how municipalities try to facilitate such initiatives. Municipalities can do this by either trying to structure the relevant networks or by various forms of process management. This analysis sheds light on how municipalities use a variety of instruments to mobilise citizens to participate in CIs. In using such instruments they can influence various factors (like motivations, personal resources, social capital and expected responsiveness; cf. Lowndes et al.’s CLEAR model) that increase the likelihood of civic engagement.     

Introduction to the special section: minority politics and the territoriality principle in Europe

Territorial arrangements for managing inter-ethnic relations within states are far from consensual. Although self-governance for minorities is commonly advocated, international documents are ambiguously formulated. Conflicting pairs of principles, territoriality vs. personality, and self-determination vs. territorial integrity, along with diverging state interests account for this gap. Together, the articles in this special section address the territoriality principle and its hardly operative practice on the ground, with particular attention to European cases. An additional theme reveals itself in the articles: the ambiguity of minority recognition politics. This introductory article briefly presents these two common themes, followed by an outline of three recent proposals discussed especially in Eastern Europe that seek to bypass the controversial territorial autonomy model: cultural rights in municipalities with a “substantial” proportion of minority members; the cultural autonomy model; and European regionalism and multi-level governance.     

Diffusion of Personalised Services among Dutch Municipalities: Evolving Channels of Persuasion

In many European countries, municipalities are becoming increasingly important as providers of electronic public services to their citizens. One of the horizons for further expansion is the delivery of personalised electronic services. In this article we describe the diffusion of personalised services in the Netherlands over the period 2006–2009 and investigate how and why various municipalities adopted personalised electronic services. In achieving this, we analyse data that were gathered during interviews with key stakeholders in 10 selected Dutch municipalities. We synthesise the findings in an explanatory model of personalised electronic service delivery diffusion. The model emphasises persuasive pressures that are channelled to potential adopters of personalised services. Furthermore, the model shows how persuasive pressure (as perceived by adopters) is followed-up by organisational search activities, and how, in various circumstances, the idea of personalised services is ‘framed’ by innovation champions, knowledge brokers and new members of staff as to appeal to specific organisational priorities and ambitions. In doing so, this article contributes to an institutional view on adoption and diffusion of innovations, in which (1) horizontal and vertical channels of persuasion and (2) human agency, rather than technological opportunity and rational cost-benefit considerations, account for actual diffusion of innovations.     

Central Steering And Local Networks: Old-Age Care In Sweden

Recently, some European social scientists have claimed that the old legal-bureau-cratic model of administration has been replaced by a new paradigm in public administration, characterized by a strong emphasis on collaboration in local inter-organizational networks. The proponents of this policy network approach take a clearly voluntaristic view on policy implementation; network actors build consensus in negotiation processes, and the role of central government is restricted to that of goal-setter, facilitator and mediator. Thereby, phenomena like power and steering are overlooked. This paper gives an account of a major Swedish reform in the area of old-age care, whereby the boundaries between regional and local areas of responsibility for care of the elderly were displaced. By using a variety of control methods, central government was able to structure and steer the old-age implementation networks. The consequences of this central steering were different on different administrative levels: for the county councils, the reform has resulted in a specialization for the core areas of primary health care and hospital treatment, whereas the municipalities have had to diversify their areas of activity. Thus, to understand the effects of the reform, implementation networks must be viewed as both hierarchical and horizontal power structures, where national government, from a hierarchically superior position, can affect formally horizontal relations between actors by creating patterns of interdependence. Central government's steering has taken on less direct forms than the traditional ones, but indirect forms of steering can certainly be efficient, especially when several mutually reinforcing control methods are combined.     

Why Does Citizens' Knowledge of New Policy Vary Between Municipalities? The Case of the Social Support Act

Providing information to citizens is an important first step in the implementation of new policy. In this study we explain differences in the knowledge of citizens between municipalities of a newly introduced law in the Netherlands, the Social Support Act, 10 months after it became into force. This law is especially important for older people that need support in their daily functioning and participation. We focused on two aspects of knowledge related to the act, i.e. having heard of the new act, and knowing how voice with regard to policy on support is organised in the place of residence. Given that socialist local governments focus more on social topics than liberal local governments, we expected citizens of municipalities with socialist councils to have more knowledge about the new Social Support Act. Contrary to our expectations, citizens from municipalities where a liberal party or a collaboration of liberal/socialist parties is the largest, have a better understanding of how voice is organised. On the other hand, citizens in municipalities with an alderman from a combination of liberal/socialist parties have a lower chance of having heard of the Social Support Act. We argue that in view of the Social Support Act, the ideology of a local government related to citizens' responsibilities (liberal view) may have more influence on citizens' knowledge than being a government that pays attention to social issues (socialist view). As far as individual differences between citizens are concerned, as expected, older people that are more educated but in poorer health status have more knowledge about the new act. A higher educational level and an excellent mental health status are related to more knowledge about voice. Educational level is the most powerful predictor for knowledge about the act.     

Administrative ethics and organizational learning in Kuwait and the united states: an empirical approach

This article explores how a sample of public agencies in Kuwait respond to ethics failure. The learning response is examined in detail, in order to understand how these agencies attempt to inquire into the organizational causes of ethics failures and implement organizational changes in response to the inquiry. This study builds upon a previous methodology for measuring the strength of the organizational learning response. The data from Kuwait is compared to an earlier, similar study of organizational ethics learning conducted in the United States. The sampled agencies devote only moderate efforts to learning from ethics failure.     

Counties and land-use regionalism: Models of growth governance

This article examines the contrasting roles of county government in state and regional growth management programs in the United States, and focuses on the potential utility of citizen-inspired land-use regionalism in stimulating county home-rule and modernization efforts. Two types of county involvement in intergovernmental growth management programs are discussed--a subordinated implementation function in “top-down” state growth programs, and an empowered role in “bottom-up” regionalism wherein county governments are key participants and mediators in the formulation of regional growth policy. A case study of grassroots regionalism in Cape Cod, Massachusetts between 1988-1991 spotlights how growth concerns can provide a compelling need for county government modernization and restructuring of land use control. The article concludes by discussing the benefits and costs of citizen-inspired regionalism, and recommends that states should do more to encourage locally-formulated regional solutions.