Local Government Reform: Compromise Through Cross-Cutting Cleavages
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Author | Tom Christensen,Jan Erling Klausen,Jostein Askim |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919887649 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919887649
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(1) 111 –126
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929919887649
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Local Government Reform:
Compromise Through Cross-
Cutting Cleavages
Jan Erling Klausen , Jostein Askim
and Tom Christensen
Abstract
Public sector reforms often take place in heterogeneous reform environments. Key political,
administrative and societal actors often advocate different definitions of problems and solutions.
A major leadership challenge is to choose a reform strategy that ensures the requisite level of
support, even when the initial conflict structure is highly complex. Using cleavage theory, we
develop assumptions about how the reform leader’s assessment of the initial conflict affects the
leader’s choice between three distinct reform strategies. These assumptions are applied to a case
study of a complex and contested public sector reform, Norway’s national local government
reform. We show how the government’s choice of a reform strategy can be understood in light
of cleavage theory and discuss the implications of these findings for further theory development.
Keywords
public sector reform, local government reform, reform strategy, coalition-building
Accepted: 17 October 2019
Introduction
Preparing, formulating and implementing comprehensive administrative reforms could
be seen basically from the actions of hierarchically dominant public leaders. In reality,
however, such reform processes tend to be characterized by negotiations among several
political, administrative and societal actors (March and Olsen, 1983; Pollitt and Bouckaert,
2017) because of heterogeneity in structures, demography, interests, norms and values in
public organizations and their environments (Olsen, 1983). The broader the reform, the
more complex the reform ecology, that is, the structure of participants, their interests, the
problems and the solutions they advocate and their resources. And the more complex the
reform ecology, the more challenging leading and implementing the reform tend to be
(Aberbach and Christensen, 2014; Patashnik, 2014).
Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Corresponding author:
Jan Erling Klausen, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1097, Blindern, 0317 Oslo,
Norway.
Email: j.e.klausen@stv.uio.no
887649PSW0010.1177/1478929919887649Political Studies ReviewKlausen et al.
research-article2019
Article
112 Political Studies Review 19(1)
We explore how political and administrative leaders link reform outcomes to the struc-
ture of the reform ecology. Building on Askim and Christensen (2009), we argue that
cleavage theory can be used for understanding this interlinkage, especially when synthe-
sized with decision-making theory. Cleavage theory builds on the assumption that the
choice of strategy for managing complex reform environments depends on the reformer’s
assessment of the initial conflict structure. We assume that the reformer would assess the
identity of the main actors in the reform ecology, the main lines of conflict, whether these
lines of conflict cross each other or whether they align – in such a way that the same actors
are on opposite sides in conflict after conflict (Knutsen, 2005; Lipset and Rokkan, 1967;
Ross, 1920). We identify three reform strategies and develop assumptions about the appro-
priateness of each strategy given the conflict structure.
We demonstrate the value of cleavage theory for reform scholarship via a case study
of the decision-making process leading to a decision to undertake a major and a contested
public sector reform, namely structural reform of the local government system. The
reform aimed at reducing the number of municipalities through amalgamations, in order
to strengthen local administrations, to improve the quality of service provision and to bet-
ter the conditions for holistic planning (KMD, 2014b).
We focus on the formation of public sector reform, in this case the trajectory from
2013 to 2017, rather than on the reform’s implementation or effects. This focus allows for
fruitful coupling of scholarship on reform, decision-making and political leadership. Our
primary interest, furthermore, is in how the reform played out in the national political
arena – the disputes and negotiations among key actors about the various measures and
decisions that constituted the overall reform strategy.
The main research questions are as follows:
Who were the main actors in the national-level decision-making process leading
up to the reform?
What were the cleavages among these actors in terms of their interests, problem
definitions and preferred solutions?
Can the cleavage structure among actors in national politics explain the extent to
which it was possible to compromise on mergers and, more broadly, to reach the
reform’s goals?
To answer these questions, we track reform leaders’ formulation of a problem diagno-
sis, construction of a solution to the problem and mobilization of support for the chosen
solution – three principal tasks for political leaders (Tucker, 1995). By closely following
the reform’s formation, we can observe elements of these three tasks as sequential steps
and can also observe elements of reciprocity between them.
The article’s first main section contains a description of the theoretical framework,
which includes a synthesis of cleavage theory and decision-making theory. The second
section concerns data collection, mainly interviews with political and administrative
elites. The third section contains a description of the reform. The empirical focus is on the
process at the national central government level, primarily the political parties and their
actions in the government and the Parliament; processes at regional and municipality
levels are included only insofar as they affect the reform at the national level. Furthermore,
the focus is on the ‘winning coalition’ built by the governing parties and their supporting
parties. Hence, we will not discuss why it was not possible to build a more encompassing
consensus on the mergers by reaching across the main fault line between the position and
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