The Ideal Mayor – In the Eyes of the Top Civil Servants In Denmark and Norway

Authors: Hans Petter Saxi, Dag O. Torjesen & Tor Ivar Karlsen Local government panel in "The Politics of Bureaucracy" section (S65),Panel: Top Civil servants and politicians in local government: Emerging patterns of Institutions, National Cultures and Leadership Abstract In modern welfare states like Denmark and Norway, there is no shortcoming of educated professionals, and we can find expertise of every kind within ,local government administration. Therefore, we do not need a new profession of political leaders. Elected representatives have another role to play. Exactly what this role should be is hard to define, and there is no theoretical consensus about the ideal politician. This is an ongoing debate both among scholars, politicians and ordinary citizens, and there exists no definition on what political leadership is and ought to be (Willumsen 2014:71). Max Weber’s idea of clear separation between politics and administration, where politicians formulate goals, and the administration find means to implement them, is contested. Studies of the relation between elected officials and the administrators reveals however that “they jointly lead through a partnership with extensive sharing and integration” (Svara 2001, Mouritzen & Svara 2002, Svara 2006, Alba & Navarro 2006, Demir 2009, Demir & Reddick 2012) This paper will be norm-descriptive. We will study how top civil servants in local governments in Denmark and Norway perceive what the mayor ought to do. Our study is based on questionnaires among top-managers in all Danish and Norwegian municipalities in 2016 and 2017, with a response rates of 649 Danish, and 647 Norwegian respondents. Based on these datasets, we will be able to characterize which ideas/perceptions the managers in municipalities have towards the mayors, measures, i.e. by 14 statements on how important they perceive different tasks which mayors normally take part in. We have divided these tasks in four roles; the universalist, the agent, the instrumental manager, and the expressive symbol (Larsen 2001:168), as our dependent variables in this study. The independent variables are firstly personal characteristics of the top-managers; their gender, age, position, education etc. Secondly, we want to compare the top-managers views of the mayors with other management ideas, such as new-public management. Thirdly, we will also include context in the independent variables, such as differences between the two countries in focus. Following the literature on political leadership in municipalities, Denmark belongs to the ‘committee leader form’, while Norway belongs to the ‘council-manager form’ (Mouritzen & Svara 2002). This indicates that the mayors in Denmark have a stronger formal position than in Norway, which can impact the top civil-servant’s ideas about the ideal mayor. We also expect size to be a contextual variable with significance on political leadership (Karlsson 2013). In the conclusion, we will move form a norm-descriptive to a normative position, and discuss the ideas about political leadership among civil servants based on ideas in political theory.