Lene Holm Pedersen

We investigate how sexism and harassment affect political candidates’ preferences for political positions by deploying a conjoint experiment among political candidates in the 2021 Danish local elections. We find that, compared to men candidates, women candidates experience far more sexism and harassment, and assess their risk of victimization as being far higher. Correspondingly, the conjoint experiment reveals that women candidates state stronger preferences for equal working environments in politics than men, while holding similar preferences for formal working conditions like political positions, remuneration, and workload. Substantively, women’s willingness to lower their remuneration and increase their workload to avoid sexism in politics is more than double the size of men’s willingness. Our approach provides us with highly accurate descriptions of candidates’ preferences for political jobs, which are often assumed rather than measured directly. This lets us quantify the magnitude of an important working condition in politics with significant repercussions for women.

This article analyzes the Danish Mink Scandal of 2020 using Karl Weick’s sense-making theory. It zooms in on the 72-hour decision-making process that led to the culling of Denmark’s entire 17 million farmed-for-fur mink population in response to the perceived threat of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) forming a new mutation. Since there was insufficient legal justification for the culling, the prime minister was forced to call a snap general election, leading to a change of government. We exploit detailed data material containing text messages, e-mail correspondence, documentary material, and specific inquiries. The article demonstrates the strength of Weick’s social–psychological perspective on sense-making for public management research. It shows how time pressure can cut across heavily institutionalized standard operating procedures. It can increase the centralization of the decision-making power at the apex and decouple the formal legal responsibilities, which remain institutionalized with the line ministries. The study argues that sense-making offers learning points that cannot be obtained from formal legal perspectives, which are used to assign responsibilities. Indeed, ex-post thinking may be too convenient—traditional solutions like punishing leaders or agencies may obscure the discovery of more systemic vulnerabilities when crises unfold.

This chapter explores the recruitment and turnover of a particular type of immigrant workers, namely, school teachers in Greenland. The central research question is: What are the motivational bases for recruitment and turnover of school teachers, comparing the West and East coast of Greenland? A wider discussion is whether particular motivational forms are worth fostering in the educational sector in Greenland, and if they may hold a potential for mitigating some of the recruitment problems the educational sector in Greenland is facing. The chapter focuses in particular on three motivational forms: Public Service Motivation, Sense of Community/Sense of Community Responsibility, and “excitement motivation”. By exploring their potential for mitigating turnover among school teachers in Western and Eastern Greenland, the chapter offers insights into how motivational forms interact and overlap. This insight may help practitioners actively mitigate turnover among school teachers and underlines the potential that lies in the intersection between public management and community psychology for both practitioners and researchers.

The concept sense of community responsibility (SOC-R) provides useful insights into public service motivation (PSM) research because SOC-R is act-relevant and connected to an identifiable community. A survey sent to 2,463 Danish councilors in multipurpose local governments illustrates how PSM and SOC-R as constructs are highly correlated, but not totally overlapping. SOC-R relates negatively to voluntary retirement but positively to visionary leadership and political influence, indicating that SOC-R is a supplementary motivation to take on responsibility and exercise leadership. The key contribution is thus a better understanding of motivation in public service provision.

This paper expands the frontier of PSM in relation to attraction/attrition, by integrating insights from PSM, SOC, SOC-R and EM. It identifies an extreme case, which offers a basis for qualitative, conceptual generalization. The paper generates three findings. Firstly, that PSM, SOC, SOC-R and EM co-exist and overlap. Second, that while personal needs as well as responsibility are important to attraction, if needs are not met attrition is difficult. However, also other-regarding forms of motivation can lead to derecruitment. Thirdly, it informs practitioners on the need to foster communities at work places where burn-out and de-recruitement is out-spoken.

The rewards of politicians are a key part of the implicit contract between politicians and citizens, and the effect of these rewards on democratic legitimacy and political recruitment is a central concern in public debate and democratic theory. Using a survey experiment, we show how citizens respond to hypothetical changes in politicians’ pay. The results indicate that citizens express lower levels of trust in the politicians when these politicians award themselves higher pecuniary rewards. However, our results also show that a devious strategy in which the rewards for politicians are less transparent ensures lower opposition from citizens than open and transparent strategies. Based on this, we outline a reinvigoration of the research agenda on “rewards at the top.”

Citizens are generally opposed to politicians receiving a high pay. We investigate the degree to which this aversion is moderated by citizens’ individual-level trust in politicians and whether institutional delegation can moderate the reactions to proposed changes in politicians’ pay. Using a survey experiment, we confirm that trust in politicians is a key predictor of attitudes regarding their pay. Distrust toward politicians seems to matter much more than general attitudes on income inequality when citizens form opinions on politicians’ pay. Furthermore, citizens’ aversion to high pay for politicians is affected by institutional delegation, but such delegation only lessen the opposition to pay raises modestly, leaving most citizens firmly against pay raises for politicians. Finally, while citizens’ trust in politicians matters greatly for their attitudes regarding politicians pay, proposed changes in politicians’ pay do not conversely affect citizen’s perceptions of the politicians.

This article contributes insight into the working conditions of political leaders based on rarely accessible high‐quality data that include unique surveys of Danish ministers, mayors, and permanent secretaries supplemented by in‐depth interviews. The results show that the classical metaphor of the leader as a puppet master being pulled by an endless number of strings also fits the ministers. Their work life is fragmented in time and space, and their time is in great demand when compared to mayors and permanent secretaries. They experience high work pressure, which comes at a cost to their personal lives. They are exposed in public life and harassed, especially on social media. The implications for the balance between the minister and permanent bureaucracy, descriptive representation as well as policy innovation and quality of decision‐making are discussed. It is concluded that stressful working conditions are likely to affect the way our democracies work.