Politicians, Civil Servants and the Changing Democracy of the Local State: Input v Output Based Channels of Citizen Demands

With an increasing emphasis on delivery and output as a source of legitimacy for the local state, questions arise about how politicians and civil servants perceive conventional, input-based channels for citizens’ influence in relationship to performance and output-oriented opportunities for such influence. This paper compares the attitudes on these issues of senior local politicians and civil servants in Norwegian and Swedish local authorities. We also compare a service sector where public management reform has been extensive (care of the elderly) with a service sector where regulation and law enforcement dominates (planning and building). Thus the paper compares politicians with bureaucrats; Swedish and Norwegian local governments; and different functional areas of local government service. Politicians assess greater importance to input-based channels of influence and to throughput than do bureaucrats. The data also suggests that politicians remain very much in control, despite recent public management reform. The analysis will be based on a quantitative dataset collected in 2012 among a set of six political and administrative leaders in all Norwegian and Swedish municipalities. This is one of a very few examples of real comparative datasets involving the two countries, where the same set of informants has been asked the same questions at the same point in time. The informants are Mayor, Vice-mayor, Chief executive, and executives for elderly care, business development and financial affairs respectively.