Top Civil Servants and Politicians in Local Government: Emerging Patterns of Institutions, National Cultures and Leadership

Abstract

The focus of this panel is on the top civil servants in local government and their interactions with the local politicians. We invite many types of paper submissions that include such a focus, be they single country descriptive papers or multiple country large N comparative papers intending to explain variations. Papers may for instance focus on the institutional antecedents for interactions between politics and administration in local government, on explaining variations in administrative leadership styles, or on the top civil servant’s role in the creation of novel ways of organizing. Papers may present empirical findings from small N qualitative case-studies or large N research from surveys and register data and/or they may present theoretical frameworks designed to understand, explain or normatively evaluate issues related to local government top civil servants. We recommend that papers clarify the institutional context of the local government system(s) in focus. The institutional context may refer to formal rules as well as informal culture and we encourage papers examining variations in civil service systems and their associated public service ethos. We encourage that papers include notions of history, path dependence and emerging patterns of change – be they deliberate top down reforms or bottom up processes of slow incremental evolution.