Global Financial Integrity<\/a> (GFI), a research and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. GFI works to study and curtail illicit financial flows from developing countries. <\/p>\n","post_title":"E. J. Fagan","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"e-j-fagan","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-23 16:53:07","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-23 16:53:07","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=613","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":638,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-10-27 15:48:58","post_date_gmt":"2020-10-27 15:48:58","post_content":"\nPh.D. candidate and teaching assistant in the department of government at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in research on local and urban policy, agendas, and Latinx politics.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Brooke Shannon","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"brooke-shannon","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-27 15:48:59","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-27 15:48:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=638","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":607,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-07-01 17:49:28","post_date_gmt":"2020-07-01 17:49:28","post_content":"\n
Dr. Mortensen received a B.Sc., M.Sc., and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Aarhus University. He is currently a professor for the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University. He supervises master theses within the following areas: public administration, public policy, party competition, and public budgeting.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Peter Bjerre Mortensen","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"peter-bjerre-mortensen","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-29 17:39:21","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-29 17:39:21","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=607","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":"
Hello and welcome to Episode 13 of the Policy Agendas podcast. I’m here with Brooke. Brooke, how are you? Hello.<\/p>\n
Well, how are you? So so, Brooke, you recently returned from a so drawn over in Europe. That’s right.<\/p>\n
We’ve done one episode with Christopher Green Peterson from your SO. And we have another episode here. We do.<\/p>\n
It’s with Dr. Peter Mortensen said that our Dr. Peter Mortensen. You guys talked about two articles. Yes.<\/p>\n
One was written on local agendas with another professor named Henrik Bech SEABURG. Also,<\/p>\n
it argues university and then another coauthored paper with a few other professors. All right. So we’re going<\/p>\n
to we’re going to transition to that. That audio right now. So listen to Brooke<\/p>\n
about three months ago discussing these two articles with Dr. Peter Mortenson at the University of<\/p>\n
Arts. Hello. Welcome to the Policy Agendas podcast. My name is Brooke Shannon. We’re coming<\/p>\n
at you alive from our host university. And I’m here with Dr. Peter Beer. Mortenson, welcome to the podcast.<\/p>\n
Peter, thank you. And so you are. Can you introduce yourself for the listeners? Sure.<\/p>\n
I’m a professor in Obama’s own university, professor and political science.<\/p>\n
Been here a while. Yes. And you also are active in the center of public leadership.<\/p>\n
That’s right. Yeah. I’m affiliated with the Center for Public Leadership and also public in<\/p>\n
the station working in kind of the intersection between public policy and public administration.<\/p>\n
Right? Yeah. So that’s a great Segway into talking about your work, your recent work that<\/p>\n
has just come out this last year with Martin Beck guard and Henrik<\/p>\n
SEABURG. And it’s all about the influence of bureaucracy on on the content and composition<\/p>\n
of the policy agenda, as well as sort of how local governments address problems and<\/p>\n
if they’re responsive. Things like that, which we usually see at the national level. So this is a really cool<\/p>\n
body of work. I think that you’re building. Yeah. So let’s start with the<\/p>\n
paper with Martin and Henrik on the bureaucracy. So<\/p>\n
in general, where did your data come from for these projects? We use data from the<\/p>\n
Danish local governments to Danish municipalities. And this paper is<\/p>\n
part of a bigger project where we saw that it would be interesting to study<\/p>\n
a agenda, setting questions where we actually use what we could call the laboratory<\/p>\n
of local governments. It’s interesting that agenda setting actually started out focusing<\/p>\n
very much local government politics and then it<\/p>\n
shifted focus to the national level. But we saw that that it was actually worse going back to the local<\/p>\n
level because it provides us with a lot of political units to to study<\/p>\n
and make some possibilities to actually<\/p>\n
take the study of policy Agenda City into a more explanatory universe where we start<\/p>\n
more systematically study different explanations. And in this paper, we focus on the bureaucracy<\/p>\n
as an explanation of the policy agenda. Cool. So the data<\/p>\n
from the Danish municipalities, as I understand it, there’s something like<\/p>\n
with the national government. Is there like a regional or state government at all? There’s also<\/p>\n
a regional level in Denmark. But they have only very specialized responsibility for health care.<\/p>\n
And then you have the Danish municipalities, a total of 98, which<\/p>\n
have responsibilities in a wide range of different policy areas. And<\/p>\n
as you say, quite autonomous political units. And they can collect<\/p>\n
taxes and make a lot of different important decisions. So that’s also why they’re interesting.<\/p>\n
Cool. So for your study on bureaucracy and local agendas, did you look at, I guess, which<\/p>\n
agencies did you look at? Did you look at all kinds of actors? Like how did you<\/p>\n
sort of code for these things? Yeah, when we did bureaucracy,<\/p>\n
we were going for a mixture of what we call administrative professionals.<\/p>\n
And the basic argument was that it is important for<\/p>\n
local policy agendas. How’s the bureaucracy looks? And<\/p>\n
it differs in the Danish municipalities how professionalized they are. And our argument is that if<\/p>\n
you have a bureaucracy where you have many a very professionalized,<\/p>\n
well educated bureaucrats, then you also have people who are good at taking problems<\/p>\n
or conditions and turning them into political problems. So what we were studying<\/p>\n
was actually how that mixture of professionalization<\/p>\n
of baroque culture, how that affects the size of the local political agenda, the number of issues<\/p>\n
and the composition of the local policy, this court. So what did you guys<\/p>\n
find? Does bureaucracy matter and how in the local agenda setting? Yeah, we did find<\/p>\n
that it matters. We did find that the more administrative professionals you had in a<\/p>\n
given range of policy, then you’ll also find that more issues into the political<\/p>\n
agenda and the political agenda. We should say, is measured based on the local council agenda.<\/p>\n
So for each meeting, we we counted and coded. What kind of issues<\/p>\n
and how many issues did they actually address? And our argument is that also in the literature on bureaucracy,<\/p>\n
you have been focusing very much what we call the back end of the process. So implementation and<\/p>\n
how the bureaucracy matters for that part. But the new thing here is that we also focus on how bureaucracy matters<\/p>\n
for the front end, for policy agenda setting, for bringing issues onto the agenda.<\/p>\n
And you could say that one hypothesis would be that it could be a kind of tradeoff.<\/p>\n
So more professionalized bureaucracy, then you’re more likely to lead to the bureaucracy. I think we find<\/p>\n
a pattern that is more optimistic for Buie for democracy also than that that<\/p>\n
they actually play together. So if you have a more professionalized bureaucracy, also bring more issues up for<\/p>\n
political deliberation and attention. Right. Yeah, that was super interesting, the professionalization<\/p>\n
aspect of it. When you look at elected officials, right, you also look at the level<\/p>\n
of pay and whether or not that affects how they sort of receive information<\/p>\n
or whether they’re able maybe to receive information, which sounds really familiar and an agenda<\/p>\n
setting perspective. So also which<\/p>\n
issues. So I guess, are there any that jumped out at you that are that were most<\/p>\n
important to the bureaucracy or how they. Which ones that they focus on? And also<\/p>\n
just which issues are more common on in local government, especially in Denmark.<\/p>\n
There are some issues that are more common and they are not that different from the national<\/p>\n
level. Economic issues matter quite a lot and we actually use<\/p>\n
some adopted version after general policy agenda setting codebook. So we can<\/p>\n
we can trace it. But of course there are also some differences. I think the main point here is it’s not<\/p>\n
so interesting what issues it’s more like the number and the diversity of issues that they<\/p>\n
bring up on the policy agenda. And then you mentioned that there was also a study<\/p>\n
on interaction effect here with the with the payments up to politicians and<\/p>\n
how many political committees we have in the municipality. So it it turns out that if<\/p>\n
you have politicians that are more professional, you have that in some municipalities,<\/p>\n
then you don’t find that strong, effective deblois ocracy. So re-interpreted in in a<\/p>\n
way that if you have local municipalities where you have less professionalized politicians,<\/p>\n
then you will also then then you can actually have a brokerage to kind of compensate<\/p>\n
for this and actually bring issues in that the politicians would bring in themselves if they had more time<\/p>\n
and spend more time on local politics. Shaw solich. So bureaucrats<\/p>\n
and in the local system they are sort of capable of giving information<\/p>\n
to a lower level or professionalized council, whereas when the<\/p>\n
council is more professionalized, they maybe have more time and more staff resources, et cetera, to<\/p>\n
search and to find this information on their own. Yeah. Cool.<\/p>\n
So in terms of the effects of the bureaucracy on<\/p>\n
these committees, do the committees shape a relationship between local government leaders<\/p>\n
and the bureaucracy in terms of specialization? I know it’s really intertwined with the<\/p>\n
professionalization, but what does that look like? Like how does it provide a mechanism almost for<\/p>\n
the agenda? Yeah, a lot of questions actually about the relationship<\/p>\n
between the committees and and the council that we still want to look look into in more detail<\/p>\n
in this paper. It’s a more simple story where we just<\/p>\n
count the number of committees. And that’s another interesting thing about today’s municipalities. You have some superlatives<\/p>\n
with only two standing committees and you have some with 14 standing committees. So they’re very different<\/p>\n
in terms of how specialized in the committee system they are. And here we just found<\/p>\n
that if you have a very few committees, then the professionalization of<\/p>\n
the bureaucracy matters more to the local policy agenda than if you have a lot of committees.<\/p>\n
And again, we take that, as you indicated before, as a measure of how<\/p>\n
involved, directly involved other politicians. If you have a lot of committees very specialized, you have politicians<\/p>\n
very close to the problems and the issues. If you have very few broad committees and you need a bureaucracy<\/p>\n
to actually bring in the issues and to kind of promote issues and<\/p>\n
make them comprehensive to the political right. Yeah. And sort of leading into<\/p>\n
the second paper with Henrik SEABURG on problems. Do you have a hunch that<\/p>\n
a stronger bureaucracy or more involved bureaucracy cetera? Sort of leads government to be<\/p>\n
more responsive. Yes, I think that would be. I went to Pretty’s, but it<\/p>\n
is of course, a quite indirect test of that mechanism. But but that’s<\/p>\n
how we would interpret the result we had in the first paper. In the second paper, you mentioned the<\/p>\n
one with the CPA. Yeah, there we study. And that’s a concern<\/p>\n
we have in there or an interest we have in this broader problem project. Is that how responsive<\/p>\n
is the political system makes it to actual problem development? And again, our argument<\/p>\n
is that there was a question that the original agenda setting study is<\/p>\n
the US agenda studies on community level studies. They were very interested in<\/p>\n
problem responsiveness. And we argue that the development of the agenda is indeed a<\/p>\n
true kind of lost interest a little bit. And in that relationship and we think it’s important. So<\/p>\n
what we study there is actually is there a direct relationship between prop and development?<\/p>\n
So unemployment, if that goes up in a municipality, can you then also see that the council<\/p>\n
give more attention to to unemployment related issues? And what about crime? If that<\/p>\n
rises due to give more attention? And we actually do find quite a strong<\/p>\n
correlation between property development and then attention to issues in that second<\/p>\n
people. Yeah. I think that this is a really cool bridge between sort of traditional<\/p>\n
political science and public administration as well. What do you see?<\/p>\n
Do you agree? And do you see like the audience as different for this type of work versus<\/p>\n
something maybe on just strictly agenda setting or just strictly on responsiveness, things<\/p>\n
like that? Yeah, I do cinq. Well, we do try<\/p>\n
to say to be studies, general political science questions. But I see you’re right that<\/p>\n
also you can see where we go with this people, the people we started out with as<\/p>\n
published in the Public Admistration Journal Jay part. So<\/p>\n
that means that we try to to bridge a little bit that gap between<\/p>\n
public policy and puppey administration. And then also when you start the local governments,<\/p>\n
local municipalities, it’s kind of getting closer to public administration in<\/p>\n
many people’s perspective. So so I guess I guess you’re right there that<\/p>\n
there might be a little different audiences. But but I actually don’t think there’s a reason that this<\/p>\n
is not both pretty good scientists and public administrations. Gonesse. Yeah, I think it’s kind of hard<\/p>\n
to get around the public administration of local government like you mentioned, issues like crime and safety,<\/p>\n
police, schools and unemployment. Things like that, like the local<\/p>\n
conditions that really like our immediate needs that local governments have to face.<\/p>\n
And so when we think of responsiveness, especially of government, like when we think<\/p>\n
of the literature, I guess a lot of the factors that we think of, like the indicators<\/p>\n
of responsiveness and thinking of Chris Logan and Stuart cercas work, for example, looking<\/p>\n
at whether or not the government response to people’s people’s either situation<\/p>\n
or preferences on things like defense spending. Right. So these like big issues that we really<\/p>\n
think are sort of typified in national government. So I’m just curious what factors<\/p>\n
give me, what factors really affect digital phone effect, problem responsiveness at<\/p>\n
the municipal level, for example? Also, one of the things at the national<\/p>\n
level that we think of is like really affecting these type of how the government responds is party and do you find<\/p>\n
that kind of stuff? I know that was a lot of questions and one, but. So like what issues does the government really focus<\/p>\n
on at the local level? And then sort of what are the factors that affect<\/p>\n
it? Yeah. I think your first part of the question is about<\/p>\n
responsiveness and how it differs from a more familiar national<\/p>\n
level approaches to this where you’re very focused on public opinion. And I think that work is<\/p>\n
of course, very important. But I think there is another approach to responsiveness, which is more<\/p>\n
in line with the traditional perspective in policy agenda setting stories where it’s more about<\/p>\n
that you can demand from a well-functioning legal system that they attempt to problems<\/p>\n
and attempt to problem development than what the voters can can expect from them. And that’s<\/p>\n
actually what you could call the first order question. And then the next question is what kind of policy solution<\/p>\n
and what do the voters actually want? What kind of solution? That might be very contextual.<\/p>\n
So I think that this is important to just study proper responsiveness. Do<\/p>\n
attend to two problems in the first place. Then you ask about what kind of<\/p>\n
factors that conditioned us into people with him. Is SEABURG<\/p>\n
we found this strong correlation actually between problem development<\/p>\n
and local political attention to a problem. But we. Found that it was condition<\/p>\n
on the degree of electoral competition to local levels and didn’t like to have a<\/p>\n
quite developed party system that mirrors the national level party’s system to have competitive<\/p>\n
elections every four years. And then you can see in the municipalities where we’ll have<\/p>\n
a close race. You’ll see much more responsiveness in terms of much more attention to problem developments<\/p>\n
compared to municipalities where one side is just winning. Traditionally,<\/p>\n
most, most of the time. And then we also looked into issue ownership, which could be<\/p>\n
the electoral competition. That’s that’s a good thing then. But to want that, that’s how it should be. But but then<\/p>\n
you could say that having parties compete for election, you will also get the bias from, for instance,<\/p>\n
issue ownership dynamics where you have left parties only respond to problem developments<\/p>\n
and left issues and right parties only respond to problem developments on vital issues. But that<\/p>\n
we didn’t actually find we didn’t find that bias. So it is a kind of optimistic<\/p>\n
picture, I think, based on how local democracy should work,<\/p>\n
at least in the Deena’s case. Yeah. Speaking of the Danish case, there’s an election coming up, right? In<\/p>\n
a few days and two days, there will be a Danish national election. Are there local elections<\/p>\n
where there’s national and what issues are really coming to the forefront? Yeah,<\/p>\n
we don’t have to. We have the local elections. They’re fixed every four years and then we have the national<\/p>\n
election. That’s the prime minister who calls them. So we don’t have. Sometimes they are the same time, sometimes<\/p>\n
not. Now we don’t have an local election. So. But we do have a national election<\/p>\n
where they also talk about issues, of course, that are relevance of relevance to the municipalities<\/p>\n
and the local elections. So that’s that is, of course, a link<\/p>\n
in Denmark between the national and local agendas. But we actually have also<\/p>\n
tried to see a what is the correlation between our ninety-eight local government<\/p>\n
agendas? And then we also have a measure of the national level Danas policy<\/p>\n
agenda. And there is a very weak correlation in general, which I think actually<\/p>\n
supports the assumption that we do have quite autonomous local political systems<\/p>\n
that respond to local problems. That’s really interesting. So speaking<\/p>\n
of the coordination and I guess differences between the Danish local project and the Danish National Project,<\/p>\n
you and Christopher Green Petersen were really the, I guess, pioneers in some<\/p>\n
way of comparative agendas project taking it from an American focus. Paul Policy<\/p>\n
Agendas Project and moving it to the international realm. Can you talk<\/p>\n
a little bit about where it came from when you did it and comparing<\/p>\n
it to the original project in your experiences? Yeah, I think the Danish National<\/p>\n
Agendas Project started out it was started out by Christopher<\/p>\n
Green Petersen back in around 2002, I think as the<\/p>\n
first non-U.S. national agenda setting project. And<\/p>\n
then I entered the project and we developed all kinds of different parlimentary<\/p>\n
measures there. And I think it’s been a real, really exciting to see<\/p>\n
how the comparative approach just developed with more and more countries coming<\/p>\n
into the deposit in this project. So so I think there’s a very<\/p>\n
still very strong research agenda there where we have a lot of comparative national level questions<\/p>\n
that we need to investigate. But when we started out, I think this is the first real<\/p>\n
local agendas project. We also have a comparative ambition there and we now have people<\/p>\n
in Norway trying to collect local council agendas.<\/p>\n
We have tried to put up some collaboration with people in Sweden. Also, we<\/p>\n
have quite strong local governments in these three countries. But I think this is<\/p>\n
my hair hope that that we can see that there will also be a real comparative<\/p>\n
approach at the local government level. I think there are a lot of issues that are to start<\/p>\n
out locally across Europe. Perhaps also in the US where we started out a project<\/p>\n
in in Austin. So so I think this could be fantastic if we could have<\/p>\n
more competitive work done. Yeah, absolutely. I think. I think in<\/p>\n
sort of in creating our codebook. Right, the Austin Kobuk, we really just sort of took<\/p>\n
the Danish girl but there and to Google Translate and then put it made sort of the language<\/p>\n
a little bit more American. So I think that comparative aspects of<\/p>\n
the different guidebooks on the different projects is really strong. And that’s sort of that the really cool thing about having<\/p>\n
an international focus on an international project. So, yeah, and I<\/p>\n
think there is a real contribution also to local government, which perhaps for some years have not been where<\/p>\n
the main political science. Visas and reserves have taken place. I don’t see any<\/p>\n
objective, objective reason that it’s that way. I think we can really, with this kind<\/p>\n
of data, also revitalize local government research. Yeah, I think it’s<\/p>\n
there’s been sort of this perspective, maybe stereotype of local government for a long time now since like<\/p>\n
the dawn of agenda setting with books like Crenson Book on air pollution, for example,<\/p>\n
that local politics is not politics, it’s just sort of service provision and things like that. So<\/p>\n
I really think your work is exciting because it’s sort of a redemption of local politics, right? It shows<\/p>\n
that issues are important and politics are important and competition things like that.<\/p>\n
So, yeah, it’s really exciting work. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much for sitting down with us<\/p>\n
at the policy agendas. We look forward to seeing and hearing more from you. So you.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/20\/2018\/12\/The-Policy-Agenda-Logo3-e1545063000555.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast-download\/226\/episode-13-do-local-policy-agendas-respond-to-local-problems-with-dr-peter-mortensen.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast-player\/226\/episode-13-do-local-policy-agendas-respond-to-local-problems-with-dr-peter-mortensen.mp3","audio_player":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast-player\/226\/episode-13-do-local-policy-agendas-respond-to-local-problems-with-dr-peter-mortensen.mp3<\/a><\/audio>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/feed\/podcast\/the-policy-agenda","embedCode":"Episode 13: Do Local Policy Agendas Respond to Local Problems? (with Dr. Peter Mortensen)<\/a><\/blockquote>