Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 4128741 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Heidi Houlberg |
| FAMILY NAME | Salomonsen |
| SIGNATURE | SALOMONSEN H H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2002-6801 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 311 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Balancing Neutral and Responsive Competences in the Context of Functional Politicization
Democratic governments can legitimately expect permanent civil servants to undertake functionally politicized tasks, such as providing political‐tactical advice. However, safeguarding the neutrality and legitimacy of a permanent civil service in the context of functional politicization necessitates that political considerations do not override professional judgment or impede the delivery of free, frank and fearless advice. Although existing resea…
Damage control: An experimental study on the impact of regulatory communication strategies on citizen trust after regulatory failure
This paper examines how communication strategies shape citizen trust in regulatory agencies following different types of regulatory failure. Using a survey experiment on a representative sample of 1568 Danish citizens, it tests the effects of five communicative strategies. The results indicate that the effectiveness of communicative responses in promoting citizen trust is highly context-sensitive. Overall, the results support earlier studies indi…
The Formation of Stakeholders' Trust in Regulatory Agencies: The Relationship Between Contact Frequency, Media Coverage, and Stakeholder Trust in Regulatory Agencies
This article investigates the formation of stakeholders' trust in regulatory agencies, as the extent to which contact frequency and sentiment of media coverage are related to different types of stakeholders' trust. Based upon original survey data from diverse stakeholders, and media coverage from 2015 to 2020 of agencies in the food safety, financial regulation, and data protection sectors across seven countries, the analysis suggests that media …
Unwritten Rules of the Game in the Danish and Dutch Core Executives
What allows ministers and senior civil servants to survive, or even thrive, in their political‐administrative contexts? Based upon a multi‐sited ethnography, this article identifies the unwritten “rules of the game” among elite political and administrative actors in the Danish and Dutch core executives and analyzes their beliefs about how to survive and thrive at the apex of executive government. The analysis is grounded in core executive researc…
A comparative analysis of senior civil servants’ involvement in media management
This article offers results of a comparative case study into how pressures from the media translate into the involvement of senior civil servants (SCSs) in media management and how this is reflected in differentiated ways in politico-administrative relationships. It offers tentative explanations for these differences through the lens of ‘public service bargains’. Based upon a qualitative analysis of documents and 62 interviews with SCSs and advis…
Does enforcement style influence citizen trust in regulatory agencies? An experiment in six countries
Establishing and maintaining citizen trust is vital for the effectiveness and long-term viability of regulatory agencies. However, limited empirical research has been conducted on the relationship between regulatory action and citizen trust. This article addresses this gap by investigating the influence of various regulatory enforcement styles on citizen trust. We conducted a pre-registered and representative survey experiment in six countries (n…
Aligning the steering of governmental organizations a comparative mixed-methods study in Denmark using stewardship theory
Stewardship theory offers considerable promise for strengthening trust between governments and organizations implementing policy. Recent studies show stewardship is partially applicable to the steering of public organizations yet it is not clear under what conditions. This study asserts that the steering of governmental organizations needs to be aligned with preferences and conditions of organizations, combining principal-agent and stewardship th…
Managing in all the right directions? The relationship between public managers’ perceived autonomy and leading upwards, sidewards, outwards and downwards
Although researchers have discussed autonomy as important at the organizational level, the autonomy of the individual manager has not received similar attention. Knowledge about how managerial autonomy is used is, however, important for understanding the conditions under which management matters. We ask whether perceived managerial autonomy enables public managers to prioritize their efforts to support their individual career progression, organiz…
In unsteady waters: How mayors and chief administrative officers make sense of a public service bargain in disequilibrium
Public service bargains (PSBs) have become a central heuristic to understand the relationship between politicians and senior bureaucrats. In this article, we add to the existing literature by exploring how both politicians and senior bureaucrats make sense of a PSB in disequilibrium. Based on individual and focus group interviews and six case studies of breakdown in the bargain, we find that bargains may be unstable due to both changing circumsta…
How is reputation management by regulatory agencies related to their employees' reputational perception
Existing research investigating regulatory agencies' reputation‐conscious behavior have primarily focused on reactive behavior in the context of reputational threats. Additionally, this literature has primarily focused on agencies' responses to such threats and external audiences' perceptions of agencies reputation, although reputation resides in both external and internal audiences. This study aims to address these two gaps by (1) identifying th…
Conceptualizing and Measuring (Public) Reputation Management
This article develops and empirically validates a conceptualization of reputation management in a public sector context. We define reputation management as management behaviors intended to identify and affect how external audiences perceive an organization, including their perceptions of what the organization is, what it strives to be, and the organization’s positive impact on society more broadly. Such behaviors include strategically communicati…
Bureaucratic politics, risk management, and agency strategy: A study of agency management in a gale
The outbreak of Covid-19 holds important lessons for general understandings of specialised agencies and their interactions with the political executive in a context of high political salience and uncertainty of the knowledge upon which agencies can base its professional decisions and pursue its policy preferences vis-à-vis the political principal. This case study analyses the behaviour of the Danish Health Authority (DHA) during two critical seri…
How does organizational task matter for the reputation of public agencies
The study of organizational task for understanding how organizations behave and evolve has been one of the classic topics in organization theory and public administration. Reputation scholarship has appeared as a promising perspective to understand internal and external organizational dynamics. Reputation scholars, too, emphasize the critical importance of task. Despite this recognition, the literature is characterized by a lack of theorization, …
Exploring Media-Covered Accountability of Public Agencies
Although journalism and media coverage are known to induce, inform, and affect public accountability processes, little is known about media-covered accountability. This study therefore explores accountability processes of Danish and Flemish agencies as subjects of the news. Drawing on news construction literature, our quantitative content analysis of newspaper coverage ( N = 13,540) focuses on the presence of accountability processes in media cov…
Duopoly, court politics and the Danish core executive
This article applies the ideas of the core executive and court politics to Danish coalition and minority governments. It asks two questions. Do these ideas travel beyond their Westminster origins? What are the dilemmas confronting the Danish executive and its court politics? The analysis is based on documentary sources and 22 elite interviews with cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries. It identifies a duopoly of Prime Minister and Minister …
Conflictual Accountability: Behavioral Responses to Conflictual Accountability of Agencies
In contemporary public governance, leaders of public organizations are faced with multiple, and oftentimes conflictual, accountability claims. Drawing upon a survey of CEO’s of agencies in seven countries, we explore whether and how conflictual accountability regimes relate to strategic behaviors by agency-CEO’s and their political principals. The presence of conflictual accountability is experienced as a major challenge and is associated with im…
The comparative ‘court politics’ of Covid-19: Explaining Government Responses to the Pandemic
What has shaped the different responses to COVID-19? The orthodoxy in the crisis management literature holds that the response to events like COVID-19 is primarily shaped by a decentralized group of actors on the ground. In this paper, we argue that a top-down explanation, focused on the actions and intentions of the core executive, is an essential complement to this bottom-up emphasis on a distributed network. Specifically, we advance a ‘court p…
Caught up or Protected by the Past? How Reputational Histories Matter for Agencies’ Media Reputations
Reputation scholars have convincingly demonstrated the relevance of understanding the behavior of government agencies as motivated by reputational concerns. Yet we must still expand our understanding of how agency audiences pass reputational judgments. Combining insights from bureaucratic reputation theory with psychological theories (motivated reasoning and attribution theory), this article theorizes and tests whether agencies’ reputational hist…
Understanding Felt Accountability: The institutional antecedents of the felt accountability of agency‐CEO's to central government
The literature on autonomous public agencies often adopts a top‐down approach, focusing on the means with which those agencies can be steered and controlled. This article opens up the black box of the agencies and zooms in on their CEO's and their perceptions of hierarchical accountability. The article focuses on felt accountability, denoting the manager's (a) expectation to have to explain substantive decisions to a parent department perceived t…
Under the Influence of Politics: Mediatisation and politico-administrative systems in Scandinavia
This conceptual article extends three ongoing scholarly debates on the mediatisation of politics – the risk of media centrism, the tendency to see mediatisation as a linear process, and the preoccupation with elected officials. We argue for the need to identify, foreground, and systematise non-media dimensions of mediatisation processes. We also argue that actors encounter mediatisation as a set of dynamic ideas rather than a fixed logic. With a …
Conceptualizing and Measuring Transformational and Transactional Leadership
Existing conceptualizations and measures of transformational and transactional leadership have unclear theoretical bases, confound leadership and its effects, and are not necessarily suitable for public organizations. Overcoming these problems is necessary to test how leadership affects performance. Many public administration scholars apply the concepts, emphasizing the need to ensure that the concepts are applicable in both public and private or…
In the Mayor We Trust? Trust as the Micro-Foundation of Complementary Politico-Administrative Relations in Local Governments
This article investigates trust between politicians and public officials in local government. Beginning with Svara’s claim that such relations are characterized by complementarity, we point to the importance of trust as the micro foundation for these relationships. Applying a mixed-methods strategy, we investigate a number of factors we expect to be related to the level of trust between politicians and public officials, as perceived by the latter…
Political instability and the ability of local government to respond to reputational threats in unison
This article investigates whether local governments are able to act in a unified manner when responding to reputational threats posed by negative media coverage. Based on an argument that local governments facing political instability are less able to perform in unison, the article investigates a number of expectations, including various types of political instability (council, agenda and policy area instability) and their relation to different t…
A reputation for what, to whom, and in which task environment: A commentary
The effects of organisational features on media attention for public organisations
This article seeks to explain the frequency and tone of media attention for public organisations. Expectations are formulated on the impact of fundamental organisational features on the frequency and tone of coverage of public organisations. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyse the nuanced interplay between legal independence, primary task and organisational size. The results show that this configurational appro…
Ensuring political responsiveness: Politicization mechanisms in ministerial bureaucracies
Although politicization is a perennial research topic in public administration to investigate relationships between ministers and civil servants, the concept still lacks clarification. This article contributes to this literature by systematically identifying different conceptualizations of politicization and suggests a typology including three politicization mechanisms to strengthen the political responsiveness of the ministerial bureaucracy: for…
Caught up or Protected by the Past? How Reputational Histories Matter for Agencies’ Media Reputations
Reputation scholars have convincingly demonstrated the relevance of understanding the behavior of government agencies as motivated by reputational concerns. Yet we must still expand our understanding of how agency audiences pass reputational judgments. Combining insights from bureaucratic reputation theory with psychological theories (motivated reasoning and attribution theory), this article theorizes and tests whether agencies’ reputational hist…
Conceptualizing and Measuring Transformational and Transactional Leadership
Existing conceptualizations and measures of transformational and transactional leadership have unclear theoretical bases, confound leadership and its effects, and are not necessarily suitable for public organizations. Overcoming these problems is necessary to test how leadership affects performance. Many public administration scholars apply the concepts, emphasizing the need to ensure that the concepts are applicable in both public and private or…
Ministerial advisers in executive government: Out from the dark and into the limelight
Ministers increasingly rely on advisers for support and advice. In many countries, these political aides are labelled differently. Generally, they serve as close confidants to their political masters and operate in the ‘shadowland’ between politics and bureaucracy. Scholarship has dragged the ministerial advisers out of the dark and described their background and functions. Still, the field of scholarship has a Westminster bias, is characterized …
Understanding Felt Accountability: The institutional antecedents of the felt accountability of agency‐CEO's to central government
The literature on autonomous public agencies often adopts a top‐down approach, focusing on the means with which those agencies can be steered and controlled. This article opens up the black box of the agencies and zooms in on their CEO's and their perceptions of hierarchical accountability. The article focuses on felt accountability, denoting the manager's (a) expectation to have to explain substantive decisions to a parent department perceived t…
A reputation for what, to whom, and in which task environment: A commentary
The effects of organisational features on media attention for public organisations
This article seeks to explain the frequency and tone of media attention for public organisations. Expectations are formulated on the impact of fundamental organisational features on the frequency and tone of coverage of public organisations. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyse the nuanced interplay between legal independence, primary task and organisational size. The results show that this configurational appro…
Political control of coordination? The roles of ministerial advisers in government coordination in Denmark and Sweden
Ministerial advisers are said to strengthen the political control of bureaucracy. Using a comparative case design, this article investigates this claim by studying the roles of ministerial advisers in government coordination in Denmark and Sweden. The article demonstrates how the roles of advisers differ in coordination: Swedish advisers directly control government coordination through hierarchical authority. The roles of advisers and bureaucrats…
Changes in Public Service Bargains: Ministers and Civil Servants in Denmark
The concept of public service bargain (PSB) has been reintroduced in recent times to the study of public administration to analyse the division of roles between ministers and the civil service in the context of public service reforms (Hood 2000, 2001, 2002; Hood and Lodge 2006). The empirical investigation of the concept of PSB in general and changes in PSBs in particular is, however, limited. This article addresses this limitation by investigati…
How does organizational task matter for the reputation of public agencies
The study of organizational task for understanding how organizations behave and evolve has been one of the classic topics in organization theory and public administration. Reputation scholarship has appeared as a promising perspective to understand internal and external organizational dynamics. Reputation scholars, too, emphasize the critical importance of task. Despite this recognition, the literature is characterized by a lack of theorization, …
The comparative ‘court politics’ of Covid-19: Explaining Government Responses to the Pandemic
What has shaped the different responses to COVID-19? The orthodoxy in the crisis management literature holds that the response to events like COVID-19 is primarily shaped by a decentralized group of actors on the ground. In this paper, we argue that a top-down explanation, focused on the actions and intentions of the core executive, is an essential complement to this bottom-up emphasis on a distributed network. Specifically, we advance a ‘court p…
Civil Servant Involvement in the Strategic Communication of Central Government Organizations: Mediatization and Functional Politicization
This article investigates the involvement of permanent civil servants in strategic communication in government organizations within the context of mediatized democracies. Based upon an argument that the involvement in strategic communication is to be seen as part and parcel of a functional politicization of the civil service, the article identifies a significant and positive relationship between media awareness and functional politicization acros…
In the Mayor We Trust? Trust as the Micro-Foundation of Complementary Politico-Administrative Relations in Local Governments
This article investigates trust between politicians and public officials in local government. Beginning with Svara’s claim that such relations are characterized by complementarity, we point to the importance of trust as the micro foundation for these relationships. Applying a mixed-methods strategy, we investigate a number of factors we expect to be related to the level of trust between politicians and public officials, as perceived by the latter…
Reputation reform strategies in local government: Investigating Denmark and Norway
This article investigates reputation reform in Norwegian and Danish local government and whether they have the same strategy content depending on the degree of administrative involvement and municipality size. Political and administrative actors are likely to cultivate different types of reputation strategies (place or organisational reputation), which explicitly embrace the potentially diverging interests cultivated by the two types of actors. W…
Does enforcement style influence citizen trust in regulatory agencies? An experiment in six countries
Establishing and maintaining citizen trust is vital for the effectiveness and long-term viability of regulatory agencies. However, limited empirical research has been conducted on the relationship between regulatory action and citizen trust. This article addresses this gap by investigating the influence of various regulatory enforcement styles on citizen trust. We conducted a pre-registered and representative survey experiment in six countries (n…
Political instability and the ability of local government to respond to reputational threats in unison
This article investigates whether local governments are able to act in a unified manner when responding to reputational threats posed by negative media coverage. Based on an argument that local governments facing political instability are less able to perform in unison, the article investigates a number of expectations, including various types of political instability (council, agenda and policy area instability) and their relation to different t…
Explaining differences in ministerial ménages à trois: Multiple bargains in Belgium and Denmark
While special advisers play an important role in most Western governments, the research on the subject is limited. This article aims to explain variations in the ménage à trois relationships between ministers, senior civil servants and special advisers in two different politico-administrative systems. The theoretical starting point is to conceptualize and explain such trilateral relationships as multiple Public Service Bargains. We find that the …
The Public Service Bargains of Danish Permanent Secretaries
Danish permanent secretaries, top civil servants in the Danish state administration, are formally both administrative heads of their ministries as well as prime advisers to Danish ministers. In this article we analyse whether and how the public service bargain (PSB) (Hood and Lodge, 2006) of Danish permanent secretaries primarily reflects elements of a managerial role as prescribed in many of the New Public Management reforms or whether their rol…
Conflictual Accountability: Behavioral Responses to Conflictual Accountability of Agencies
In contemporary public governance, leaders of public organizations are faced with multiple, and oftentimes conflictual, accountability claims. Drawing upon a survey of CEO’s of agencies in seven countries, we explore whether and how conflictual accountability regimes relate to strategic behaviors by agency-CEO’s and their political principals. The presence of conflictual accountability is experienced as a major challenge and is associated with im…
Who's at the table? An analysis of ministers’ participation in EU Council of Ministers meetings
The Council of Ministers is an important part of EU decision-making. However, contrary to what is formally expected member, states are not always represented by ministers at Council meetings. Unfortunately, our knowledge of who is actually participating is limited. First, the article investigates the extent to which ministers actually participate in Council meetings. We conclude that a substantial number of the participants are not ministers. Sec…
A comparative analysis of senior civil servants’ involvement in media management
This article offers results of a comparative case study into how pressures from the media translate into the involvement of senior civil servants (SCSs) in media management and how this is reflected in differentiated ways in politico-administrative relationships. It offers tentative explanations for these differences through the lens of ‘public service bargains’. Based upon a qualitative analysis of documents and 62 interviews with SCSs and advis…
In unsteady waters: How mayors and chief administrative officers make sense of a public service bargain in disequilibrium
Public service bargains (PSBs) have become a central heuristic to understand the relationship between politicians and senior bureaucrats. In this article, we add to the existing literature by exploring how both politicians and senior bureaucrats make sense of a PSB in disequilibrium. Based on individual and focus group interviews and six case studies of breakdown in the bargain, we find that bargains may be unstable due to both changing circumsta…
How is reputation management by regulatory agencies related to their employees' reputational perception
Existing research investigating regulatory agencies' reputation‐conscious behavior have primarily focused on reactive behavior in the context of reputational threats. Additionally, this literature has primarily focused on agencies' responses to such threats and external audiences' perceptions of agencies reputation, although reputation resides in both external and internal audiences. This study aims to address these two gaps by (1) identifying th…
Exploring Media-Covered Accountability of Public Agencies
Although journalism and media coverage are known to induce, inform, and affect public accountability processes, little is known about media-covered accountability. This study therefore explores accountability processes of Danish and Flemish agencies as subjects of the news. Drawing on news construction literature, our quantitative content analysis of newspaper coverage ( N = 13,540) focuses on the presence of accountability processes in media cov…
Under the Influence of Politics: Mediatisation and politico-administrative systems in Scandinavia
This conceptual article extends three ongoing scholarly debates on the mediatisation of politics – the risk of media centrism, the tendency to see mediatisation as a linear process, and the preoccupation with elected officials. We argue for the need to identify, foreground, and systematise non-media dimensions of mediatisation processes. We also argue that actors encounter mediatisation as a set of dynamic ideas rather than a fixed logic. With a …
Changes in Public Service Bargains: Ministers and Civil Servants in Denmark
The concept of public service bargain (PSB) has been reintroduced in recent times to the study of public administration to analyse the division of roles between ministers and the civil service in the context of public service reforms (Hood 2000, 2001, 2002; Hood and Lodge 2006). The empirical investigation of the concept of PSB in general and changes in PSBs in particular is, however, limited. This article addresses this limitation by investigati…
The Public Service Bargains of Danish Permanent Secretaries
Danish permanent secretaries, top civil servants in the Danish state administration, are formally both administrative heads of their ministries as well as prime advisers to Danish ministers. In this article we analyse whether and how the public service bargain (PSB) (Hood and Lodge, 2006) of Danish permanent secretaries primarily reflects elements of a managerial role as prescribed in many of the New Public Management reforms or whether their rol…
Explaining differences in ministerial ménages à trois: Multiple bargains in Belgium and Denmark
While special advisers play an important role in most Western governments, the research on the subject is limited. This article aims to explain variations in the ménage à trois relationships between ministers, senior civil servants and special advisers in two different politico-administrative systems. The theoretical starting point is to conceptualize and explain such trilateral relationships as multiple Public Service Bargains. We find that the …
Ensuring political responsiveness: Politicization mechanisms in ministerial bureaucracies
Although politicization is a perennial research topic in public administration to investigate relationships between ministers and civil servants, the concept still lacks clarification. This article contributes to this literature by systematically identifying different conceptualizations of politicization and suggests a typology including three politicization mechanisms to strengthen the political responsiveness of the ministerial bureaucracy: for…
Who's at the table? An analysis of ministers’ participation in EU Council of Ministers meetings
The Council of Ministers is an important part of EU decision-making. However, contrary to what is formally expected member, states are not always represented by ministers at Council meetings. Unfortunately, our knowledge of who is actually participating is limited. First, the article investigates the extent to which ministers actually participate in Council meetings. We conclude that a substantial number of the participants are not ministers. Sec…
Civil Servant Involvement in the Strategic Communication of Central Government Organizations: Mediatization and Functional Politicization
This article investigates the involvement of permanent civil servants in strategic communication in government organizations within the context of mediatized democracies. Based upon an argument that the involvement in strategic communication is to be seen as part and parcel of a functional politicization of the civil service, the article identifies a significant and positive relationship between media awareness and functional politicization acros…
Czars in the White House: The Rise of Policy Czars as Presidential Management Tools
Ministerial advisers in executive government: Out from the dark and into the limelight
Ministers increasingly rely on advisers for support and advice. In many countries, these political aides are labelled differently. Generally, they serve as close confidants to their political masters and operate in the ‘shadowland’ between politics and bureaucracy. Scholarship has dragged the ministerial advisers out of the dark and described their background and functions. Still, the field of scholarship has a Westminster bias, is characterized …
Political control of coordination? The roles of ministerial advisers in government coordination in Denmark and Sweden
Ministerial advisers are said to strengthen the political control of bureaucracy. Using a comparative case design, this article investigates this claim by studying the roles of ministerial advisers in government coordination in Denmark and Sweden. The article demonstrates how the roles of advisers differ in coordination: Swedish advisers directly control government coordination through hierarchical authority. The roles of advisers and bureaucrats…
Communicating the Vision: How Face‐to‐Face Dialogue Facilitates Transformational Leadership
For public managers facing political and structural constraints, transformational leadership promises to meaningfully improve outcomes by communicating an inspiring vision of the organization. But this promise rests to a great degree on the communication skills and behaviors of the leader. A better understanding of how transformational leadership functions in organizations therefore requires a deeper application of theory from the field of commun…
Conceptualizing and Measuring Transformational and Transactional Leadership
Existing conceptualizations and measures of transformational and transactional leadership have unclear theoretical bases, confound leadership and its effects, and are not necessarily suitable for public organizations. Overcoming these problems is necessary to test how leadership affects performance. Many public administration scholars apply the concepts, emphasizing the need to ensure that the concepts are applicable in both public and private or…
In the Mayor We Trust? Trust as the Micro-Foundation of Complementary Politico-Administrative Relations in Local Governments
This article investigates trust between politicians and public officials in local government. Beginning with Svara’s claim that such relations are characterized by complementarity, we point to the importance of trust as the micro foundation for these relationships. Applying a mixed-methods strategy, we investigate a number of factors we expect to be related to the level of trust between politicians and public officials, as perceived by the latter…
Political instability and the ability of local government to respond to reputational threats in unison
This article investigates whether local governments are able to act in a unified manner when responding to reputational threats posed by negative media coverage. Based on an argument that local governments facing political instability are less able to perform in unison, the article investigates a number of expectations, including various types of political instability (council, agenda and policy area instability) and their relation to different t…
A reputation for what, to whom, and in which task environment: A commentary
The effects of organisational features on media attention for public organisations
This article seeks to explain the frequency and tone of media attention for public organisations. Expectations are formulated on the impact of fundamental organisational features on the frequency and tone of coverage of public organisations. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyse the nuanced interplay between legal independence, primary task and organisational size. The results show that this configurational appro…
Reputation reform strategies in local government: Investigating Denmark and Norway
This article investigates reputation reform in Norwegian and Danish local government and whether they have the same strategy content depending on the degree of administrative involvement and municipality size. Political and administrative actors are likely to cultivate different types of reputation strategies (place or organisational reputation), which explicitly embrace the potentially diverging interests cultivated by the two types of actors. W…
Under the Influence of Politics: Mediatisation and politico-administrative systems in Scandinavia
This conceptual article extends three ongoing scholarly debates on the mediatisation of politics – the risk of media centrism, the tendency to see mediatisation as a linear process, and the preoccupation with elected officials. We argue for the need to identify, foreground, and systematise non-media dimensions of mediatisation processes. We also argue that actors encounter mediatisation as a set of dynamic ideas rather than a fixed logic. With a …
Duopoly, court politics and the Danish core executive
This article applies the ideas of the core executive and court politics to Danish coalition and minority governments. It asks two questions. Do these ideas travel beyond their Westminster origins? What are the dilemmas confronting the Danish executive and its court politics? The analysis is based on documentary sources and 22 elite interviews with cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries. It identifies a duopoly of Prime Minister and Minister …
Conflictual Accountability: Behavioral Responses to Conflictual Accountability of Agencies
In contemporary public governance, leaders of public organizations are faced with multiple, and oftentimes conflictual, accountability claims. Drawing upon a survey of CEO’s of agencies in seven countries, we explore whether and how conflictual accountability regimes relate to strategic behaviors by agency-CEO’s and their political principals. The presence of conflictual accountability is experienced as a major challenge and is associated with im…
The comparative ‘court politics’ of Covid-19: Explaining Government Responses to the Pandemic
What has shaped the different responses to COVID-19? The orthodoxy in the crisis management literature holds that the response to events like COVID-19 is primarily shaped by a decentralized group of actors on the ground. In this paper, we argue that a top-down explanation, focused on the actions and intentions of the core executive, is an essential complement to this bottom-up emphasis on a distributed network. Specifically, we advance a ‘court p…
Caught up or Protected by the Past? How Reputational Histories Matter for Agencies’ Media Reputations
Reputation scholars have convincingly demonstrated the relevance of understanding the behavior of government agencies as motivated by reputational concerns. Yet we must still expand our understanding of how agency audiences pass reputational judgments. Combining insights from bureaucratic reputation theory with psychological theories (motivated reasoning and attribution theory), this article theorizes and tests whether agencies’ reputational hist…
Understanding Felt Accountability: The institutional antecedents of the felt accountability of agency‐CEO's to central government
The literature on autonomous public agencies often adopts a top‐down approach, focusing on the means with which those agencies can be steered and controlled. This article opens up the black box of the agencies and zooms in on their CEO's and their perceptions of hierarchical accountability. The article focuses on felt accountability, denoting the manager's (a) expectation to have to explain substantive decisions to a parent department perceived t…
Exploring Media-Covered Accountability of Public Agencies
Although journalism and media coverage are known to induce, inform, and affect public accountability processes, little is known about media-covered accountability. This study therefore explores accountability processes of Danish and Flemish agencies as subjects of the news. Drawing on news construction literature, our quantitative content analysis of newspaper coverage ( N = 13,540) focuses on the presence of accountability processes in media cov…
Conceptualizing and Measuring (Public) Reputation Management
This article develops and empirically validates a conceptualization of reputation management in a public sector context. We define reputation management as management behaviors intended to identify and affect how external audiences perceive an organization, including their perceptions of what the organization is, what it strives to be, and the organization’s positive impact on society more broadly. Such behaviors include strategically communicati…
Bureaucratic politics, risk management, and agency strategy: A study of agency management in a gale
The outbreak of Covid-19 holds important lessons for general understandings of specialised agencies and their interactions with the political executive in a context of high political salience and uncertainty of the knowledge upon which agencies can base its professional decisions and pursue its policy preferences vis-à-vis the political principal. This case study analyses the behaviour of the Danish Health Authority (DHA) during two critical seri…
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