Episode 13: Do Local Policy Agendas Respond to Local Problems? (with Dr. Peter Mortensen)

Hello and welcome to Episode 13 of the Policy Agendas podcast. I’m here with Brooke. Brooke, how are you? Hello.

Well, how are you? So so, Brooke, you recently returned from a so drawn over in Europe. That’s right.

We’ve done one episode with Christopher Green Peterson from your SO. And we have another episode here. We do.

It’s with Dr. Peter Mortensen said that our Dr. Peter Mortensen. You guys talked about two articles. Yes.

One was written on local agendas with another professor named Henrik Bech SEABURG. Also,

it argues university and then another coauthored paper with a few other professors. All right. So we’re going

to we’re going to transition to that. That audio right now. So listen to Brooke

about three months ago discussing these two articles with Dr. Peter Mortenson at the University of

Arts. Hello. Welcome to the Policy Agendas podcast. My name is Brooke Shannon. We’re coming

at you alive from our host university. And I’m here with Dr. Peter Beer. Mortenson, welcome to the podcast.

Peter, thank you. And so you are. Can you introduce yourself for the listeners? Sure.

I’m a professor in Obama’s own university, professor and political science.

Been here a while. Yes. And you also are active in the center of public leadership.

That’s right. Yeah. I’m affiliated with the Center for Public Leadership and also public in

the station working in kind of the intersection between public policy and public administration.

Right? Yeah. So that’s a great Segway into talking about your work, your recent work that

has just come out this last year with Martin Beck guard and Henrik

SEABURG. And it’s all about the influence of bureaucracy on on the content and composition

of the policy agenda, as well as sort of how local governments address problems and

if they’re responsive. Things like that, which we usually see at the national level. So this is a really cool

body of work. I think that you’re building. Yeah. So let’s start with the

paper with Martin and Henrik on the bureaucracy. So

in general, where did your data come from for these projects? We use data from the

Danish local governments to Danish municipalities. And this paper is

part of a bigger project where we saw that it would be interesting to study

a agenda, setting questions where we actually use what we could call the laboratory

of local governments. It’s interesting that agenda setting actually started out focusing

very much local government politics and then it

shifted focus to the national level. But we saw that that it was actually worse going back to the local

level because it provides us with a lot of political units to to study

and make some possibilities to actually

take the study of policy Agenda City into a more explanatory universe where we start

more systematically study different explanations. And in this paper, we focus on the bureaucracy

as an explanation of the policy agenda. Cool. So the data

from the Danish municipalities, as I understand it, there’s something like

with the national government. Is there like a regional or state government at all? There’s also

a regional level in Denmark. But they have only very specialized responsibility for health care.

And then you have the Danish municipalities, a total of 98, which

have responsibilities in a wide range of different policy areas. And

as you say, quite autonomous political units. And they can collect

taxes and make a lot of different important decisions. So that’s also why they’re interesting.

Cool. So for your study on bureaucracy and local agendas, did you look at, I guess, which

agencies did you look at? Did you look at all kinds of actors? Like how did you

sort of code for these things? Yeah, when we did bureaucracy,

we were going for a mixture of what we call administrative professionals.

And the basic argument was that it is important for

local policy agendas. How’s the bureaucracy looks? And

it differs in the Danish municipalities how professionalized they are. And our argument is that if

you have a bureaucracy where you have many a very professionalized,

well educated bureaucrats, then you also have people who are good at taking problems

or conditions and turning them into political problems. So what we were studying

was actually how that mixture of professionalization

of baroque culture, how that affects the size of the local political agenda, the number of issues

and the composition of the local policy, this court. So what did you guys

find? Does bureaucracy matter and how in the local agenda setting? Yeah, we did find

that it matters. We did find that the more administrative professionals you had in a

given range of policy, then you’ll also find that more issues into the political

agenda and the political agenda. We should say, is measured based on the local council agenda.

So for each meeting, we we counted and coded. What kind of issues

and how many issues did they actually address? And our argument is that also in the literature on bureaucracy,

you have been focusing very much what we call the back end of the process. So implementation and

how the bureaucracy matters for that part. But the new thing here is that we also focus on how bureaucracy matters

for the front end, for policy agenda setting, for bringing issues onto the agenda.

And you could say that one hypothesis would be that it could be a kind of tradeoff.

So more professionalized bureaucracy, then you’re more likely to lead to the bureaucracy. I think we find

a pattern that is more optimistic for Buie for democracy also than that that

they actually play together. So if you have a more professionalized bureaucracy, also bring more issues up for

political deliberation and attention. Right. Yeah, that was super interesting, the professionalization

aspect of it. When you look at elected officials, right, you also look at the level

of pay and whether or not that affects how they sort of receive information

or whether they’re able maybe to receive information, which sounds really familiar and an agenda

setting perspective. So also which

issues. So I guess, are there any that jumped out at you that are that were most

important to the bureaucracy or how they. Which ones that they focus on? And also

just which issues are more common on in local government, especially in Denmark.

There are some issues that are more common and they are not that different from the national

level. Economic issues matter quite a lot and we actually use

some adopted version after general policy agenda setting codebook. So we can

we can trace it. But of course there are also some differences. I think the main point here is it’s not

so interesting what issues it’s more like the number and the diversity of issues that they

bring up on the policy agenda. And then you mentioned that there was also a study

on interaction effect here with the with the payments up to politicians and

how many political committees we have in the municipality. So it it turns out that if

you have politicians that are more professional, you have that in some municipalities,

then you don’t find that strong, effective deblois ocracy. So re-interpreted in in a

way that if you have local municipalities where you have less professionalized politicians,

then you will also then then you can actually have a brokerage to kind of compensate

for this and actually bring issues in that the politicians would bring in themselves if they had more time

and spend more time on local politics. Shaw solich. So bureaucrats

and in the local system they are sort of capable of giving information

to a lower level or professionalized council, whereas when the

council is more professionalized, they maybe have more time and more staff resources, et cetera, to

search and to find this information on their own. Yeah. Cool.

So in terms of the effects of the bureaucracy on

these committees, do the committees shape a relationship between local government leaders

and the bureaucracy in terms of specialization? I know it’s really intertwined with the

professionalization, but what does that look like? Like how does it provide a mechanism almost for

the agenda? Yeah, a lot of questions actually about the relationship

between the committees and and the council that we still want to look look into in more detail

in this paper. It’s a more simple story where we just

count the number of committees. And that’s another interesting thing about today’s municipalities. You have some superlatives

with only two standing committees and you have some with 14 standing committees. So they’re very different

in terms of how specialized in the committee system they are. And here we just found

that if you have a very few committees, then the professionalization of

the bureaucracy matters more to the local policy agenda than if you have a lot of committees.

And again, we take that, as you indicated before, as a measure of how

involved, directly involved other politicians. If you have a lot of committees very specialized, you have politicians

very close to the problems and the issues. If you have very few broad committees and you need a bureaucracy

to actually bring in the issues and to kind of promote issues and

make them comprehensive to the political right. Yeah. And sort of leading into

the second paper with Henrik SEABURG on problems. Do you have a hunch that

a stronger bureaucracy or more involved bureaucracy cetera? Sort of leads government to be

more responsive. Yes, I think that would be. I went to Pretty’s, but it

is of course, a quite indirect test of that mechanism. But but that’s

how we would interpret the result we had in the first paper. In the second paper, you mentioned the

one with the CPA. Yeah, there we study. And that’s a concern

we have in there or an interest we have in this broader problem project. Is that how responsive

is the political system makes it to actual problem development? And again, our argument

is that there was a question that the original agenda setting study is

the US agenda studies on community level studies. They were very interested in

problem responsiveness. And we argue that the development of the agenda is indeed a

true kind of lost interest a little bit. And in that relationship and we think it’s important. So

what we study there is actually is there a direct relationship between prop and development?

So unemployment, if that goes up in a municipality, can you then also see that the council

give more attention to to unemployment related issues? And what about crime? If that

rises due to give more attention? And we actually do find quite a strong

correlation between property development and then attention to issues in that second

people. Yeah. I think that this is a really cool bridge between sort of traditional

political science and public administration as well. What do you see?

Do you agree? And do you see like the audience as different for this type of work versus

something maybe on just strictly agenda setting or just strictly on responsiveness, things

like that? Yeah, I do cinq. Well, we do try

to say to be studies, general political science questions. But I see you’re right that

also you can see where we go with this people, the people we started out with as

published in the Public Admistration Journal Jay part. So

that means that we try to to bridge a little bit that gap between

public policy and puppey administration. And then also when you start the local governments,

local municipalities, it’s kind of getting closer to public administration in

many people’s perspective. So so I guess I guess you’re right there that

there might be a little different audiences. But but I actually don’t think there’s a reason that this

is not both pretty good scientists and public administrations. Gonesse. Yeah, I think it’s kind of hard

to get around the public administration of local government like you mentioned, issues like crime and safety,

police, schools and unemployment. Things like that, like the local

conditions that really like our immediate needs that local governments have to face.

And so when we think of responsiveness, especially of government, like when we think

of the literature, I guess a lot of the factors that we think of, like the indicators

of responsiveness and thinking of Chris Logan and Stuart cercas work, for example, looking

at whether or not the government response to people’s people’s either situation

or preferences on things like defense spending. Right. So these like big issues that we really

think are sort of typified in national government. So I’m just curious what factors

give me, what factors really affect digital phone effect, problem responsiveness at

the municipal level, for example? Also, one of the things at the national

level that we think of is like really affecting these type of how the government responds is party and do you find

that kind of stuff? I know that was a lot of questions and one, but. So like what issues does the government really focus

on at the local level? And then sort of what are the factors that affect

it? Yeah. I think your first part of the question is about

responsiveness and how it differs from a more familiar national

level approaches to this where you’re very focused on public opinion. And I think that work is

of course, very important. But I think there is another approach to responsiveness, which is more

in line with the traditional perspective in policy agenda setting stories where it’s more about

that you can demand from a well-functioning legal system that they attempt to problems

and attempt to problem development than what the voters can can expect from them. And that’s

actually what you could call the first order question. And then the next question is what kind of policy solution

and what do the voters actually want? What kind of solution? That might be very contextual.

So I think that this is important to just study proper responsiveness. Do

attend to two problems in the first place. Then you ask about what kind of

factors that conditioned us into people with him. Is SEABURG

we found this strong correlation actually between problem development

and local political attention to a problem. But we. Found that it was condition

on the degree of electoral competition to local levels and didn’t like to have a

quite developed party system that mirrors the national level party’s system to have competitive

elections every four years. And then you can see in the municipalities where we’ll have

a close race. You’ll see much more responsiveness in terms of much more attention to problem developments

compared to municipalities where one side is just winning. Traditionally,

most, most of the time. And then we also looked into issue ownership, which could be

the electoral competition. That’s that’s a good thing then. But to want that, that’s how it should be. But but then

you could say that having parties compete for election, you will also get the bias from, for instance,

issue ownership dynamics where you have left parties only respond to problem developments

and left issues and right parties only respond to problem developments on vital issues. But that

we didn’t actually find we didn’t find that bias. So it is a kind of optimistic

picture, I think, based on how local democracy should work,

at least in the Deena’s case. Yeah. Speaking of the Danish case, there’s an election coming up, right? In

a few days and two days, there will be a Danish national election. Are there local elections

where there’s national and what issues are really coming to the forefront? Yeah,

we don’t have to. We have the local elections. They’re fixed every four years and then we have the national

election. That’s the prime minister who calls them. So we don’t have. Sometimes they are the same time, sometimes

not. Now we don’t have an local election. So. But we do have a national election

where they also talk about issues, of course, that are relevance of relevance to the municipalities

and the local elections. So that’s that is, of course, a link

in Denmark between the national and local agendas. But we actually have also

tried to see a what is the correlation between our ninety-eight local government

agendas? And then we also have a measure of the national level Danas policy

agenda. And there is a very weak correlation in general, which I think actually

supports the assumption that we do have quite autonomous local political systems

that respond to local problems. That’s really interesting. So speaking

of the coordination and I guess differences between the Danish local project and the Danish National Project,

you and Christopher Green Petersen were really the, I guess, pioneers in some

way of comparative agendas project taking it from an American focus. Paul Policy

Agendas Project and moving it to the international realm. Can you talk

a little bit about where it came from when you did it and comparing

it to the original project in your experiences? Yeah, I think the Danish National

Agendas Project started out it was started out by Christopher

Green Petersen back in around 2002, I think as the

first non-U.S. national agenda setting project. And

then I entered the project and we developed all kinds of different parlimentary

measures there. And I think it’s been a real, really exciting to see

how the comparative approach just developed with more and more countries coming

into the deposit in this project. So so I think there’s a very

still very strong research agenda there where we have a lot of comparative national level questions

that we need to investigate. But when we started out, I think this is the first real

local agendas project. We also have a comparative ambition there and we now have people

in Norway trying to collect local council agendas.

We have tried to put up some collaboration with people in Sweden. Also, we

have quite strong local governments in these three countries. But I think this is

my hair hope that that we can see that there will also be a real comparative

approach at the local government level. I think there are a lot of issues that are to start

out locally across Europe. Perhaps also in the US where we started out a project

in in Austin. So so I think this could be fantastic if we could have

more competitive work done. Yeah, absolutely. I think. I think in

sort of in creating our codebook. Right, the Austin Kobuk, we really just sort of took

the Danish girl but there and to Google Translate and then put it made sort of the language

a little bit more American. So I think that comparative aspects of

the different guidebooks on the different projects is really strong. And that’s sort of that the really cool thing about having

an international focus on an international project. So, yeah, and I

think there is a real contribution also to local government, which perhaps for some years have not been where

the main political science. Visas and reserves have taken place. I don’t see any

objective, objective reason that it’s that way. I think we can really, with this kind

of data, also revitalize local government research. Yeah, I think it’s

there’s been sort of this perspective, maybe stereotype of local government for a long time now since like

the dawn of agenda setting with books like Crenson Book on air pollution, for example,

that local politics is not politics, it’s just sort of service provision and things like that. So

I really think your work is exciting because it’s sort of a redemption of local politics, right? It shows

that issues are important and politics are important and competition things like that.

So, yeah, it’s really exciting work. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much for sitting down with us

at the policy agendas. We look forward to seeing and hearing more from you. So you.