Kasper M. Hansen

The relationship between politicians and administrators ¿ a logic of disharmony

The relationship between politicians (elected officials) and administrators (appointed officials) is the cornerstone to understanding the governing process and has always been highly debated in the public administration literature. Traditionally, the debate focuses on Weber’s clear separation between politicians and administrators and a criticism of the basic assumptions of Weber’s model. An alternative model is the Dichotomy–Duality–Model which gives a more varied description of the relationship between politicians and administrators. This article argues that in order to get a more thorough understanding of the complicated interaction between politicians and administrators, it is necessary to pay attention to the two groups’ logic of action. It is argued that politicians are driven by inductive logic of action while administrators are influenced by a deductive logic of action. These two opposites create a logic of disharmony between the two agents. Empirical findings from counties in Denmark support the present and the resistance of the logic, since management tools designed to create a harmonious relationship between politicians and administrators are unable to change the logic of disharmony.

The Danes and Europe: From EC 1972 to Euro 2000 ^ Elections, Referendums and Attitudes

Within Europe, the Danish electorate is the one that has most often expressed its opinion about the European Union in elections and in national referendums. Votes and attitudes are analysed for the ¢ve elections to the European Parliament between 1979 and 1999 and in the six referendums ^ from the ¢rst on membership of the EC in 1972 to the September 2000 referendum on acceptance of the euro, the European single currency. The article gives an overview of the development of Danish public opinion in relation to the European Union from 1960 to 2000, the turnouts at referendums, and the elections and results for the European Parliament. It is shown that since Denmark joined the EU, public opinion has £uctuated greatly, although the balance among Danish European Parliament members has remained stable. The reasons for the frequent use of referendums in Denmark and a thematic outline of the six referendums are put forward. The article concludes with a comprehensive analysis of public attitudes towards the referendum on the euro in 2000. It is shown that regional electoral patterns have vanished, but underlying attitudes are manifested in the public.

Cyber-Campaigning in Denmark: Application and Effects of Candidate Campaigning

ABSTRACT We set out to analyze the application and effect of cyber-campaigning among candidates at the 2011 Danish general election campaign in order to provide hard evidence on whether new technologies are electorally decisive, or whether traditional offline campaigning still makes sense. First, both Web sites and Facebook sites are popular among candidates, but other features such as blogs, feeds, newsletters, video uploads, SMS, and Twitter are used by less than half the candidates. Second, only age and possibly education seem to matter when explaining the uptake of cyber-campaigning. The prominent candidates are not significantly more likely to use cyber-campaigning tools and activities. Third, the analysis of the effect of cyber-campaigning shows that the online score has an effect on the interparty competition for personal votes, but it does not have a significant effect when controlling for other relevant variables. The online rank of candidates within party and constituency is more important for intraparty competition; in fact, it has a significant effect: it matters to be more online than fellow candidates. In sum, the effect of cyber-campaigning is limited, but it matters more to the contest among same-party candidates than among parties in an open list, multimember constituency electoral system like the Danish have.

Campaigns Matter: How Voters Become Knowledgeable and Efficacious During Election Campaigns

Election campaigns are more than simple competitions for votes; they also represent an opportunity for voters to become politically knowledgeable and engaged. Using a large-scale Web panel (N ≈ 5,000), we track the development of political knowledge, internal efficacy, and external efficacy among voters during the 2011 Danish parliamentary election campaign. Over the course of the campaign, the electorate’s political knowledge increases, and these gains are found across genders, generations, and educational groups, narrowing the knowledge gap within the electorate. Furthermore, internal and external efficacy increase over the course of the campaign, with gains found across different demographic groups, particularly narrowing the gaps in internal efficacy. The news media play a crucial role, as increased knowledge and efficacy are partly driven by media use, although tabloids actually decrease external efficacy. The findings suggest that positive campaign effects are universal across various media and party systems.

Retiring from Voting: Turnout among Senior Voters

The Western population is growing older. Nevertheless, few studies examine the manner in which seniors are gradually demobilized from voting, partly because they are difficult to reach with surveys. Using a unique government records dataset of the actual turnout from the 2009 Danish municipal elections, we show how turnout for seniors falls more than 30 percentage points between ages 60 and 90. Though declining health matters, it is far from the entire story. Much of the turnout decline can be explained by the disruption of social ties. Withdrawing from the labour market demobilizes people. Seniors also tend to live alone more often than the general population, meaning that they receive less social encouragement to vote. We also look into why turnout drops faster for women than for men. Women lose their social network earlier than men. They are on average widowed and live alone at an earlier age than men, since women live longer and are typically younger than their husbands. Older generations of women are also less educated and have lower job market affiliation than men.

Getting Out the Vote With Evaluative Thinking

Democratic institutions often do not evaluate their instruments. By working closely with authorities, we developed a field experiment to examine an initiative to increase voter turnout among 18-year-olds that had not previously been evaluated. Particular attention was paid to developing an appropriate program theory and to designing the evaluation in a manner that was consistent with legal and ethical requirements. The program distributed different versions of mobilization letters to the newly enfranchised voters. The treatment effect was positive on turnout and diminished the gap in turnout across population groups, and the effects of the treatments were strongest for individuals with the lowest initial propensity to vote. Cost-effectiveness analysis indicated that the price of an additional vote was approximately USD

Economic and Cultural Drivers of Immigrant Support Worldwide

136. Our findings influenced policy design and helped establish the principle of evaluative thinking as an integrated part of the future program.

How are Voters Influenced by Opinion Polls? The Effect of Polls on Voting Behavior and Party Sympathy

Employing a comparative experimental design drawing on over 18,000 interviews across eleven countries on four continents, this article revisits the discussion about the economic and cultural drivers of attitudes towards immigrants in advanced democracies. Experiments manipulate the occupational status, skin tone and national origin of immigrants in short vignettes. The results are most consistent with a Sociotropic Economic Threat thesis: In all countries, higher-skilled immigrants are preferred to their lower-skilled counterparts at all levels of native socio-economic status (SES). There is little support for the Labor Market Competition hypothesis, since respondents are not more opposed to immigrants in their own SES stratum. While skin tone itself has little effect in any country, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries do elicit significantly lower levels of support, and racial animus remains a powerful force.

Can governments use Get Out The Vote letters to solve Europe’s turnout crisis? Evidence from a field experiment

Abstract Similar to all other types of information, public opinion polls can influence public opinion. We present two hypotheses to understand how polls affect public opinion: the bandwagon and the underdog effect. The bandwagon effect claims that voters “jump on the bandwagon,” which means that if a party is gaining in the polls, the party will gain additional support from the voters, and vice versa if the party is losing in the polls. The underdog effect suggests that if a party is losing in the polls, the party will gain some sympathy votes to offset this loss. We use a survey experiment to test the two hypotheses. We find evidence of the bandwagon effect, and the effect is strongest in the positive direction. When voters learn that a party is gaining in the polls, voters will be more likely to vote for it. There is also some evidence for the negative bandwagon effect. We find no evidence for the underdog effect. The effects head in the same direction regardless of the size of the party. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings with regards to a potential ban on publishing opinion polls.

How campaigns polarize the electorate Political polarization as an effect of the minimal effect theory within a multi-party system

Abstract Declining levels of turnout are a problem in European elections. Are Get Out The Vote campaigns the solution to the problem? While many studies have investigated such campaigns in the US, little is known about their effect in Europe. The article presents a field experiment in which encouragement to vote in an upcoming Danish election is delivered to more than 60,000 first-time voters using direct personal letters. Eight different letters are designed, based on the calculus of voting and prospect theory. The sample is randomly divided into treatment groups or the control group. Using validated turnout, small positive effects of receiving a letter on turnout are found, with little difference across letters. The letters mostly mobilised voters with a low propensity to vote and thus increased equality in participation. In sum, while letters have some effect, they are not likely to be a panacea for solving Europe’s turnout challenges.