POLECO Political leadership in local councils. Comparing Norway and Denmark

About the project

In this project, we developed the theoretical concept of ‘interactive political leadership’. We did this in response to the recognized need for stronger political leadership in handling increasingly complex and wicked problems at the national as well as at the local level of government. In the traditional approach to political leadership, citizen participation is regarded as desirable because it empowers people and gives them a say in questions concerning their community. Participation also plays a role in educating people about democratic procedures and the formation of a democratic society. However, seen through the lens of the interactive political leadership concept, citizen participation is viewed in a more pragmatic way, and participation is considered desirable because it helps elected politicians to gain insight and knowledge, thus better equipping them to discuss and solve local challenges.

We have mapped organizational features and routines that are believed to strengthen the interactive role of local councillors, their contact with citizens, and the latter’s empowerment. The results show that such interactive measures are much more widespread in Danish than in Norwegian municipalities. One reason for this seems to be the large number of inhabitants in Danish municipalities and a correspondingly greater need for councillors to get in contact with citizens than in Norway, where the municipalities are considerably smaller. Also, the fact that Danish local governments were hit much more directly by the financial crisis in 2008 than Norwegian local governments may explain the need for councillors to involve citizens in co-governance and co-creation.

The project has generated knowledge about the importance of institutions for interactive political leadership. First, we have shown that the different systems for organizing the relationship between the top political and the top administrative actors in the two countries matter. While Danish mayors head the municipal administration, this role is administrative in Norwegian local governments, where the chief administrative executive head the administration. Among other things, this affects how measures intended to strengthen the interactive role of local councillors actually work out in practice, that is whether councillors feel that their political leadership role is supported or not. Second, our project has revealed that arenas where political issues can be discussed and solutions found are of the utmost importance in enabling local councillors to perform interactive political leadership, and we further show how this may be done.

Publikasjoner

2020

• Røiseland, Asbjørn og Signy Irene Vabo (red.)(in press). Folkevalgt og politisk leder. Oslo: Cappelen Damm. Open Access, lenke kommer.
• Lo, Christian (in prep.). When Politics Meets Bureaucracy: norms, rules, conformity and cheating. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Sørensen, Eva (2020). Interactive Political Leadership: The Role of Politicians in the Age of Governance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Bentzen, Tina Øllgaard, Eva Sørensen and Jacob Torfing (2020). Strengthening Public Service Production, Administrative Problem Solving and Political Leadership through Co-creation of Innovative Public Value Outcomes? The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal, 25(1), article no. 4, http://www.innovation.cc/volumes-issues/vol25-no1.htm
• Røiseland, Asbjørn and Signy Irene Vabo (2020). Administrators as drivers of democratic innovations. The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal, 25(1), article no. 2, http://www.innovation.cc/volumes-issues/vol25-no1.htm
• Sørensen, Eva and Signy Irene Vabo (2020). Introduction: A Public Innovation Perspective on Change in Local Democracy. The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal, 25(1), article no. 1, http://www.innovation.cc/volumes-issues/vol25-no1.htm

2019

• Bentzen Tina Øllgaard, Christian Lo and Marte Winsvold (2019). Strengthening local political leadership through institutional design: Why context matters. Local Government Studies. DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2019.1690994.
• Røiseland, Asbjørn (2019). Politisk lederskap som arena for innovasjon. In Ringholm og Tennås Holmen (eds.) Innovasjon møter kommunen. Oslo: Cappelen Damm, Kapittel 2.
• Røiseland, Asbjørn and Christian Lo (2019). Samskaping – nyttig begrep for norske forskere og praktikere? Norsk Statsvitenskapelig Tidsskrift, 35(1), 51–58. DOI: 10.18261/issn.1504-2936-2019-01-03.
• Røiseland, Asbjørn and Signy Irene Vabo (2019). Size and Democracy revisited - A critical discussion of the claimed trade-off between problem-solving capacity and citizen participation. Lex Localis - Journal of Local Self-Government, 17(2), s. 285–298. DOI: 10.4335/17.2.285-298(2019).
• Sørensen, Eva and Tina Øllegård Bentzen (2019). Public administrators in interactive democracy: a multi-paradigmatic approach. Local Government Studies, 1–24. DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2019.1627335.
• Sørensen, Eva and Jacob Torfing (2019). Towards robust hybrid democracy in Scandinavian municipalities? Scandinavian Political Studies, 42(1), 25–49. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9477.12134.
• Sørensen, Eva and Jacob Torfing (2019). Designing institutional platforms and arenas for interactive political leadership, Public Management Review, 21(10), s. 1443–1463. DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2018.1559342
• Sørensen, Eva and Jacob Torfing (2019). Interactive political leadership in theory and practice: How elected politicians may benefit from co-creating public value outcomes. Administrative Sciences, 9(3), s. 1–23.
• Torfing, Jacob, Eva Sørensen and Tina Øllegård Bentzen (2019). Institutional design for collective and holistic leadership. International Journal of Public Leadership, 15(1), s. 58–76. DOI: 10.1108/IJPL-12-2018-0059.
• Winsvold, Marte (2019). Kvinner og menn i kommunepolitikken – hvem mener de at de representerer og hvor stor innflytelse opplever de å ha? Tidsskrift for kjønnsforskning, 03, s. 177–197.

2018

• Lo, Christian (2018). Normative Hierarchy and Pragmatic Egalitarianism in Municipal Policy Development. In Bendixen, Synnøve, Mari Bente Bringslid and Halvar Vike (eds.) Egalitarianism In Scandinavia: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland, s. 157–178. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-59791-1.
• Lo, Christian (2018). Between Government and Governance: Opening the Black Box of the Transformation Thesis. International Journal of Public Administration, 41(8), s. 650–656. DOI:10.1080/01900692.2017.1295261
• Sørensen, Eva and Jacob Torfing (2018). The democratizing impact of governance networks: From pluralization, via democratic anchorage, to interactive political leadership. Public Administration, 96(2), s. 302–317. DOI: 10.1111/padm.12398

2017

• Lo, Christian (2017). Going from Government to Governance. In Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, 2017. (ISBN 978-3-319-31816-5)

Advisory Board

• Associate Professor Sarah Ayes, University of Bristol, UK
• Professor Paul t’Hart, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Professor Jean Hartley, Open University, London, UK
• Associate Professor Daniel Kübler, University of Zurich, Switzerland