Martin Baekgaard

The Gendered Division of Labor in Assignments to Political Committees: Discrimination or Self-Selection in Danish Local Politics?

The literature on the descriptive representation of women in parliaments is voluminous, and most studies focus on different levels of womens representation across legislatures (e.g., Krook 2010; Matland 1998; Paxton 1997; Reynolds 1999; Siaroff 2000). The number of women in parliaments is counted across the globe, and explanations as to what facilitates and hinders the election of female politicians are sought. At a macro level, PR systems, high district magnitudes, and, of course, gender quotas are some of the institutional mechanisms that have been identified as advantageous for womens ambitions to conquer seats in legislatures. These aspects of the electoral system have also drawn widespread attention among electoral engineers, since they can be manipulated, far more so than can socioeconomic factors (such as womens educational level or participation in the labor market) or cultural factors (such as dominant religion or the cultural perception of womens societal role), both of which have also been identified as important to womens descriptive representation at the parliamentary level (see, e.g., Christmas-Best and Kjaer 2007).

Rational Planning and Politicians' Preferences for Spending and Reform: Replication and Extension of a Survey Experiment

ABSTRACT The rational planning cycle of formulating strategic goals and using performance information to assess goal implementation is assumed to assist decision-making by politicians. Empirical evidence supporting this assumption is scarce. Our study replicates a Danish experiment on the relation between performance information and politicians‘ preferences for spending and reform and extends this experiment by investigating the role of strategic goals. Based on a randomized survey experiment (1.484 Flemish city councillors) and an analysis of 225 strategic plans, we found that information on low and high performance as well as strategic goals impact politicians’ preferences for spending and reform.

Conducting Experiments in Public Management Research: A Practical Guide

ABSTRACT This article provides advice on how to meet the practical challenges of experimental methods within public management research. We focus on lab, field, and survey experiments. For each of these types of experiments we outline the major challenges and limitations encountered when implementing experiments in practice and discuss tips, standards, and common mistakes to avoid. The article is multi-authored in order to benefit from the practical lessons drawn by a number of experimental researchers.

Performance Information and Citizen Service Attitudes: Do Cost Information and Service Use Affect the Relationship?

ABSTRACT Performance information has been suggested as a means to increase the capacity of decision makers and citizens to make informed decisions. This article studies the impact of performance information on citizens’ attitudes to whether service programs should be expanded. Service programs are generally highly demanded by citizens and some—but not all—citizens are active service users. By nesting two experiments in a survey of 1,866 Danish citizens, the research shows that performance information matters more to service attitudes if allocated in conjunction with cost information and that performance information is more important to the attitudes of service users than to those of non-users. These findings suggest that information on performance for specific services should be presented simultaneously with information on costs in order to create more nuanced attitudes among citizens and that this is of particular importance in service areas with major groups of core users.

The Dynamics of Competitor Party Behaviour

We present an argument concerning the temporal dynamics of the policy positions of the main opposition parties in a legislative body; what we label competitor parties. In the article we ask how competitor parties react when losing an election, and what happens if they continue to lose election upon election. It is argued that competitor parties from the outset are trying to maximise both policy- and office-seeking preferences. We posit that this is best achieved by moving away from the median towards the party base. Yet in the event that electoral success continues to elude the competitor party a process of self-reflection, or learning, will set in within the party because the policy position of the competitor party is clearly unacceptable to pivotal voter groups. In this event, the competitor party will move strongly towards the policy position of the incumbent party, thereby neutralising any advantage the incumbent party may previously have had in terms of policy position. By giving up on its policy preferences, the competitor party maximises total utility because then, if nothing else, it becomes more likely to win office. If the competitor party continues to lose, a new cycle of divergence and convergence will set in, generating a wave-like pattern. The argument is illuminated using two well-known examples from the United States and the United Kingdom and tested employing a unique large-N data set from Danish municipalities. We show that the temporal dynamics of competitor parties are as expected.

Local News Media and Voter Turnout

Abstract A reasonably high turnout is a quality of a local democracy. In this article, we investigate whether media coverage of politics leads to increased or decreased voter turnout. Based on a unique data set, our analysis shows that local news media coverage has a positive effect on voter turnout, but only if the news media provide politically relevant information to the voters and only at local elections. Both findings are in accordance with the Information Model, which states that rising levels of political relevant information increases the probability of voting.

Tax Limitations and Revenue Shifting Strategies in Local Government

The literature on tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) shows how limiting the freedom of local governments to levy taxes may have considerable unexpected effects. Entities subjected to such limitations may, as their proponents hope, react by cutting expenditures and revenue, but they may also strategically change their revenue structure and increase reliance on income sources not subjected to limitations. However, these findings are overwhelmingly based on studies of state and local governments in the United States. Their relevance outside this empirical setting remains unclear. A study of Denmark, where the central government imposed tax limitations on municipalities in 2009, makes two contributions. First, it probes the empirical domain of the U.S. findings. Second, it constitutes an empirical testing ground where endogeneity is not a pressing concern. In the United States, TELs are often self‐imposed either by local legislatures or by citizens through voter initiatives, which may bias the correlation between TELs and tax rates. We analyze a dataset of all Danish municipalities from 2007 to 2011 and demonstrate that TELs do indeed stop taxes from increasing but also confirm the findings from the TEL literature that entities subjected to tax limitations employ revenue‐shifting strategies. In Denmark, however, these strategies are contingent on the specifics of the Danish intergovernmental system, which render central government grants an attractive object of revenue‐shifting strategies. Our analysis thus helps identify the scope conditions of core findings within the literature.

Does Fiscal Austerity Affect Political Decision-Makers’ Use and Perception of Performance Information?

ABSTRACT This article investigates whether the fiscal environment that politicians face influences their use of performance information. It poses two competing hypotheses, suggesting that fiscal austerity either increases politicians’ use of performance information, because they are more concerned about keeping up good performance in times of austerity, or decreases their use, because balancing the books is more vital in times of austerity, and therefore keeping within the budget gains political emphasis relative to sustaining good performance. The link between fiscal austerity and politicians’ use of performance information is tested using survey and documentary data from Danish municipalities. The article concludes that politicians who face high fiscal austerity use performance information to a lesser extent than colleagues who face less fiscal austerity, thus indicating the use of performance information is “the politics of good times.”

Shaping Political Preferences: Information Effects in Political-Administrative Systems

Abstract Information is at the heart of politics. However, since information is always sent by someone who is more or less powerful, it is difficult to disentangle the effect of information from the power of the sender. Drawing on a standard model of attitude formation, we argue that presenting information can affect preferences of politicians regardless of the power of the sender. We test this proposition in a survey experiment with 1205 Danish local politicians in which the experimental groups were presented with varying levels of cost information but where sender remained constant. The experiment shows that even in a setting where the information is not disclosed by a powerful sender, information may have a stronger impact on political preferences than other well-known determinants such as committee and party affiliation. Our findings speak to learning theories, knowledge perspectives and the literature on the determinants of politicians’ preferences.

Intergovernmental Grants and Public Expenditures: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Abstract The relationship between intergovernmental grants and public expenditures is one of the most studied phenomena in the local public finance literature. However, little is known about whether the impact of unconditional grants is fundamentally different from that of other sources of municipal revenue. We study this question by means of a large-scale randomised survey experiment among Danish local politicians, which allows for a comparison of the impact of changes in various sources of municipal revenue. Our findings challenge the conventional conception in the public finance literature that money works differently depending on which sector they are generated in. Instead, ideology plays an important role in explaining how local politicians want to allocate resources when faced with changes in local government revenue.