Conference Agenda

In a cabinet in any democratic country there will always be ministers that are coming and going, partly because the PM decides to make changes, partly because coalitions changes, but also because of other types of turbulence. In Norway, the Støre government came to power in September 2021 and in March 2024 only 6 out of 19 ministries had the same political leaders as in 2021, which is rather few historically speaking. Adding to the reshuffling of ministers, 7 ministers have got to go, or which is often the case, stepped aside because of lack of trust from the PM. Of those, two quitted because of ‘inapproprate’ personal relations, while five left because of economic inappropriate behavior, impartiality questions, and plagiarism. It is these latter five that is the focus of this paper.

The research questions posed are the following:

• What is characterizing the processes whereby ministers are leaving the government?

• What is the role played by the central administrative leadership in these processes and what are the implications for the relationship between political and administrative leadership?

• How can one explain features of these processes based on the concepts of accountability and appropriateness?

A core question in accountability theory is accountability to whom? According to Boven (2007) there are four different types of accountability, which we will relate to our cases. First, and the most obvious one, is political accountability, which means that political leaders, in our case ministers, would be held accountable towards the PM, who further is accountable towards an elected body – the Parliament. Second, administrative accountability, which is a hierarchical relationship between administrative leaders and their political masters. Third, judicial accountability, related to following laws and rules. Fourth, professional accountability, which deals with relationship between professional peers. Adding to this, Schillemans (2008) proposes horizontal or societal accountability, which deals with how public leaders, here executive politicians, are explaining their motives or appealing to the public through the media. We will particularly look into different aspects of political accountability and how this is related to the other types of accountability, especially the administrative one, in the processes.

Adding to this question is the question of who is accountable, individuals or organizations/ collectives; and the question of accountability for what, like tasks, goals, processes/procedures, or performance.

In settled situations the accountability relations can stick to formal principal-agent relations, but in unsettled situations one also has to take the logic of appropriateness into consideration dealing with cultural or informal norms and values as in institutional approaches (Olsen, 2017). Accountability deals with so-called matching, meaning the coupling of situation, role, and decision rules, which is developed in a long historical process (Christensen and Lægreid, 2021; March and Olsen, 1989). What is, for example, a minister meant to do in a crisis based on his/her role and cultural norms and values in a public organization? This means that what is formally right, is not necessarily culturally appropriate, because political appropriateness has certain cultural norms and values. Or, acts may both be formally and culturally inappropriate. To enact the role as a minister is to balance the formal and cultural obligations in their role. We will investigate the combined elements of accountability and appropriateness in the cases where the ministers must go.

The paper also adds to the literature of felt accountability (Overman and Schillemans, 2021; Schillemans et al. 2021) which addresses a more individual perspective on accountability. In our case it relates to the ministers’ perceptions of accountability and their expectation to have to explain their decisions to the PM, which is perceived to judge legitimacy and to have the expertise to evaluate those decisions.

Studies of the acquittal of political executives often focus on the literature of scandals, while our main contribution of this paper is to see them through the combined concepts of accountability and appropriateness, where the relationship between political executives and administrative leadership empirically is of importance.

What happens to bureaucrats' career plans when they are faced with working for political principals who do not share their own ideological preferences? Will they stay with their current organization or look for new jobs? The challenge of political preference misalignment is most critical during government transitions. How does a shift from aligned to misaligned party-political preferences (or the other way around) impact civil servants' career plans? In a meritocratic bureaucracy like Norway's, embedded norms of party-political neutrality and loyalty to the political leadership suggest that bureaucrats must serve executive politicians equally well, regardless of the party those politicians represent. In such a context, ideological (mis)alignment may not affect how they perform their work, but it may influence bureaucrats' personal career choices of staying or leaving their current workplace. Our study utilizes a unique and novel data source, The Norwegian Panel of Public Administrators. The data set provides information about the bureaucrats’ turnover intentions as well as their party preferences. We take advantage of data collected before and after an election that resulted in a wholesale change of government from a centre-right coalition to a center-left coalition. Our main finding is that ideological misalignment does not significantly impact turnover intention. We do observe some significant effects among supporters of parties not previously or currently in government. However, government transitions have a more significant impact on ministry officials compared to agency officials. We suggest that our results are good news for the functioning of meritocratic bureaucracies, as bureaucrats are comfortable working under ideologically hostile governments, as opposed to more politicized contexts.

The increasingly complex economic, environmental and societal context pressures governments to seek new ways to adapt the existing public policies and design novel policy solutions. Policy experimentation has been proposed as a key strategy for coping with the challenges and furthering more anticipatory forms of governance. Despite considerable academic discussion on policy experimentation, there is surprisingly little systematic analysis of the political dimensions of public policy experiments. In this paper, we analyse how the perceptions of blame avoidance and credit claiming by policy actors influence experimental policymaking. In the theoretical part of the paper, we synthesize insights from the studies on blame avoidance and credit claiming, and experimental policymaking. By juxtaposing these two hitherto disparate streams of literature, we outline expectations about how the mechanisms of blame avoidance and credit claiming can influence policymakers’ attitudes towards experiments.

In the empirical part, we probe the plausibility of the theoretical propositions by using a comparative case study of Estonia and Finland. While both countries embrace public sector innovation, their experiences with policy experiments vary considerably. Finland has become world famous for launching large-scale RCTs during the last decade, while in Estonia, no large-scale policy experiments have been undertaken yet. Our research questions are: 1) How have the motivations of blame avoidance and credit claiming influenced experimental policymaking in those two countries? 2) Which contextual factors have influenced the blame avoidance and credit claiming motivations in public policy experiments? As sources of data, we use 66 interviews conducted with public officials in Estonia and Finland in 2022-2023.

As our comparative case study demonstrates, the theoretical lenses of blame avoidance and credit claiming can indeed help to advance our understanding of political motivations in experimental policymaking. Examining the blame/credit calculus of policymakers can help to explain why politicians can be inclined or disinclined to undertake policy experiments. Furthermore, observations from the two cases reinforce the insight of Leong and Howlett (2017) who suggest that the attributions of blame and credit are subjective and dependent on the specific context. The diverging perceptions of blame and credit associated with large-scale policy experiments in Finland and Estonia reveal how the same policymaking instrument can be viewed very differently depending on the context. In Finland, policy actors predominantly view experiments as potential sources of credit: a way to show that politicians are taking steps to address problems and proceed in a cautious way. In Estonia, experiments are viewed as politically risky: they are perceived to generate too little credit (compared to large-scale reforms), while the potential failure of an experiment is regarded as generating considerable blame.

Probing the different contexts of Estonia and Finland helps to shed light on why policymakers view policy experiments through different blame/credit calculus. We find that cumulative experience with policy experiments, expected media reactions to experiments and public trust play an important role in shaping policymakers’ blame-credit calculus related to policy experiments.

The role of the public bureaucracy in policymaking has been a focal area in public administration theory and research since the writings of Weber and Wilson. The notion that there is a neat dichotomy between the two spheres has for a long time been abandoned, and most acknowledge that the public bureaucracy is deeply involved in shaping public policy (Mouritzen & Svara, 2002; Nelson & Svara, 2015; Svara, 2001, 2008). The public bureaucracy will always have some autonomy, and may influence policymaking through agenda-setting, defining decision premises, implementation, and evaluation. Concerning bureaucratic autonomy, recent research takes on a contingency perspective, looking for factors that may increase or decrease such autonomy (Baekgaard, 2011; Baekgaard et al., 2018; Blom-Hansen et al., 2021; Jacobsen, 2006, 2023).

The current study takes as a starting point that the political forum that administrative leaders report to constitutes one of the most important contingency factors. Three characteristics of the political forum are highlighted as especially important: the party-political fragmentation, the political “color” of the political leadership, and whether the political leadership spans across important party-political borders or not. Arguing from a principal-agent theory standpoint, we first outline a hypothesis that increased political fragmentation will increase administrative autonomy. We further argue that divergence within the political leadership also will affect administrative autonomy. Administrative autonomy will be higher, we hypothesize, in cases where the political leadership spans representatives from both parties on the left side and the right side of the political left-right conflict line. Finally, we hypothesize that there will be substantial differences in administrative autonomy according to whether the political leadership belongs to the political right or the political left. As politicians from leftist parties tend to have a higher degree of trust in the public bureaucracy than politicians from parties on the right, we hypothesize that administrative autonomy will be higher when political leaders represent leftist parties.

The three hypotheses are tested on Norwegian municipalities using data from a large national survey being conducted every four years (“Kommunal organisering”). The last was conducted in 2019/20, and is the one used in this study. Administrative autonomy is measured through a question on who in the municipality that formulates the preferred decision alternative to the municipal council. This can be done by a political actor – the mayor, the executive committee, or other political committees – or can be delegated to the chief municipal executive (CME). Leaving this right to the CME is clearly a strengthening of administrative autonomy, and consequently strengthening the potential administrative influence on policy making.

The survey data on the right of the CME to formulate and propose the preferred decision alternative is coupled with information on the political organization of Norwegian municipalities, collected after every election by the National Bureau of Statistics. 216 municipalities, highly representative of all municipalities in Norway (356), constitutes the data base.