The Scandinavian Welfare Model in Crisis? Achievements and Problems of the Danish Welfare State in an Age of Unemployment and Low Growth

The "Scadinavian welfare model" is often considered vulnerable to mass unemployment. The Danish welfare state provides and opportunity to examine the capacities of the "Scandinavian model" to adapt to this situation. This article explores a number of alleged crisis problems of th welfare state, ground into budgetary pressures, incentive problems and legitimacy problems. It is conclude that most of these problems have been exasggerated and that the rrreal threats to the economic foundations of the welfare state should be found in political steering and incentive problems rather thant in the exogenous pressures from the social and economic system, or in pressure from th unintended side effects of welfare arrangement. It is furthermore argued that one of the main achievements of the Danish welfare state has been so prevent unemployment and labor market marginalization from developing into a broad-ranged social marginalizaton and a political po-larization which could undermine citizenship and solidarity in society.     

Transparency and Openness: A Reform or Education Policy?

Current policies are developed through complex and dynamic historical processes and conflicts originating in these processes. In 2002 a new Act on Transparency and Openness in education was put into effect in Denmark. The Act is a formalised system of performance measurement, and introduced a new feature to the governing of the Danish education system. All educational institutions are obliged to publish on the Internet average grades of final examinations. The historical institutional concept of path dependency shows how the outline of the Act is made at an earlier stage. The Act is layered as a new institutional arrangement on top of pre-existing institutions. By focusing on how institutional and political processes interact and are combined, new contributions to historical institutionalism are further developed without considering institutional reproduction and innovation as opposites. It is elaborated how the Act, with respect to certain dimensions, respectively reproduces, breaks with and combines two formerly outlaid paths of education policy and reform policy.     

Encouraging Political Voices of Underrepresented Citizens through Coproduction: Evidence from a Randomized Field Trial

Not all citizens’ voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them “coproducers”) increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in the education of their children on their propensity to directly voice their preferences with the education policy through government citizen surveys and their tendency to vote in elections. Among these normally underrepresented citizens, coproduction increased their propensity to voice their preferences to politicians through citizen surveys but not their tendency to vote. The effect on voicing in government citizen surveys tends to be larger among nonvoters. The results indicate how policies involving underrepresented citizens can raise the voices of people who would not otherwise be heard.     

Managing Employee Motivation: Exploring the Connections Between Managers’ Enforcement Actions,Employee Perceptions,and Employee Intrinsic Motivation

A number of studies show that the use of external interventions such as command systems and economic incentives can decrease employee intrinsic motivation. Our knowledge of why the size of “the hidden cost of rewards” differs among organizations is, however, still sparse. In this article, we analyze whether local managers—the primary enforcers of external interventions—affect how employees perceive a command system and thereby affect employee intrinsic motivation. Using a multilevel dataset of 1,190 teachers and 32 school principals, we test whether principals’ use of “hard,” “mixed,” or “soft” actions to enforce a command system (obligatory teacher-produced student plans) is associated with teacher intrinsic motivation. Results show that teachers experiencing “hard” enforcement actions have lower intrinsic motivation than teachers experiencing “soft” enforcement actions. As expected by motivation crowding theory, part of this association is mediated by teachers’ student plan requirement perception. These findings support the motivation crowding argument that employee intrinsic motivation depend on the employees’ need for self-determination.     

How Should We Estimate the Performance Effect of Management? Comparing Impacts of Public Managers’ and Frontline Employees’ Perceptions of Management

Many areas of public management research are dominated by a top-focused perspective in which emphasis is placed on the notion that managers themselves are usually the best sources of information about managerial behavior. Outside of the leadership literature, managers are also the typical survey respondents in public management studies. An alternative perspective on management can be provided by subordinates’ perceptions of what management is doing. Surveys of subordinates and of managers each pose potential advantages and potential disadvantages when it comes to measuring management, and each approach is likely to prove more fruitful for measuring certain management functions. Using a unique data set of parallel surveys on management with managers and their subordinates as respondents, we examine the differences and relationships between Danish school managers’ and teachers’ perceptions of management functions and the implications of such relationships for organizational performance. We find a surprisingly low correlation between manager and teacher responses regarding the same management functions. Teacher responses are better predictors of student performance for management aspects that are visible to and mediated by teachers. However, manager responses better predict performance for manager expectations that are less visible to employees.     

Building Support? The Importance of Verbal Rewards for Employee Perceptions of Governance Initiatives

The relationship between managers’ use of rewards and employees’ motivation is controversial, but recent research suggests that employee perceptions of governance initiatives can help us understand the association. Experimental evidence further emphasizes the difference between verbal and material rewards, and this study therefore analyzes real-world public managers’ use of these different rewards and their employees’ perceptions of a governance initiative. This enables us to shed light on a mechanism through which rewards can be connected to motivation. Can rewards contribute to a supportive perception of governance initiatives and potentially crowd-in motivation? This is analyzed in a multi-level dataset with 82 Danish school principals and their 1,273 employees. Managers’ use of contingent verbal rewards is positively associated with employees’ perceptions of the relevant governance initiative, while the corresponding association between material rewards and employee perceptions is weak and statistically insignificant when controlling for other types of managerial behavior. Although the findings need to be tested in an experimental design, they suggest that verbal rewards are a promising tool for public managers.     

The Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE) as a Tool for Studying Political Communication

The dynamic process tracing environment (DPTE) is a unique and flexible tool permitting researchers to study information search and decision making in various manners. This article describes the rationale behind the system, some history of how it has revolutionized the study of voter decision making in elections, and some of the principles of design within the system.     

US politics and World Bank IDA-lending

Abstract

This paper studies the role of US political factors in the allocation of World Bank concessional lending, where US political interests are proxied by voting similarity in the United Nations General Assembly on issues identified as important by the US Department of State. In contrast to previous studies we find that the US exerted a significant influence on IDA lending during the period 1993–2000. We demonstrate that the influence was both statistically as well as economically significant. Finally, we demonstrate that our result is robust with respect to the omission of the IDA Country Performance Rating index.     

Models of Public Service Provision—When Will Knights and Knaves Be Responsive to Pawns and Queens?

This article extends the framework of Le Grand (2003 Le Grand, J. 2003. Motivation, agency and public policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2010 Le Grand, J. 2010. Knights and knaves return: Public service motivation and the delivery of public services. International Public Management Journal, 13(1): 56–71. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to encompass responsiveness, and the main argument is that the combination of employee motivation, user capacity, and models of public service provision potentially has serious implications for responsiveness across service areas. Although research on employee motivation thrives, especially in the public service motivation (PSM) literature, few studies have investigated user capacity empirically, and we know little about the combination of PSM, user capacity and models of service provision. Analyzing four central service areas (day care, schools, hospitals, and universities), we find variations in both user capacity and PSM. Taking this variation as a point of departure we discuss what implications different combinations of employee motivation, user capacity, and models of public service provision may have for responsiveness.