Institutional Design for Interactive Political Leadership in Local Governments – Possibilities and Possible Effects

In the literature on interactive governance, we find a cry for local political leadership and suggestions for how interaction between politicians and citizens may be organized. Taking an instrumental organizational approach, the assumption would be that new leadership practices emerge from changes in the institutional design of political institutions. In contrast, theories highlighting the importance of organizational culture propose that political attitudes and practice may be hard to change and ultimately depends on a change in culture, role perceptions and work routines. This paper investigates to what degree and how institutional design aiming to promote interactive political leadership in Norwegian and Danish municipalities have an impact on role perceptions and routinized political practices respectively, and in unison. Role perceptions and routinized practices among local councilors may be hard to change using institutional design because established attitudes and organizational practices, in politics as elsewhere, are proven hard to change. Realizing that rules of the game and various veto points may encourage specific types of practice, councilors’ role perceptions are likely to be the hardest to influence. Furthermore, based in the laymen principle, elected representatives in local councils in Norway and Denmark are not full time employees with loyalty in any hierarchically based institution (if any, the party hierarchy may be in operation). Indeed, councilors’ attention to the role they play as elected representatives for voters, local interests and groups of citizens may downplay the experienced importance of imposed design changes. Taking departure in the literature on political leadership, we elaborate on the premises for “interactive political leadership”, denoting a practice in which elected representatives involve citizens and various stakeholders in policy development and implementation. Indicators of interactive political leadership are then developed to map and evaluate the councilors’ self-reported political practice, role perceptions and attitudes towards different aspects of interactive political leadership. Assessing the possible impact of differences in institutional design, we will base our analysis on qualitative and quantitative data from four Danish and four Norwegian local councils where institutional measures to renew the role of elected representatives have been implemented. The measures implemented in the Danish cases encourage interactive leadership in a more direct way than the measures implemented in the Norwegian ones, leaving us with the assumption that the attitudes and practice among Danish politicians will be more in favor of interactivity than the Norwegian politicians will. Our comparative design is advantageous due to the two countries interconnecting history and similarities in national political-administrative institutions and welfare regime – leaving the context rather similar. Thus, if attitudes and practice among Danish politicians are more in favor of interactive political leadership than in the Norwegian cases, therefore, we may conclude that institutional design is efficient to form role perceptions and political practices. If we do not find significant differences among the councilors in the two countries, however, we will have an argument that it may be hard to design – or re-orientate – local political leadership.