Political instability and the ability of local government to respond to reputational threats in unison
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | Caroline Howard Grøn,Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852317714533 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Review of
Administrative
Article
Sciences
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
Political instability and the ability
2019, Vol. 85(3) 440–456
! The Author(s) 2017
of local government to respond
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to reputational threats in unison
DOI: 10.1177/0020852317714533
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Caroline Howard Grøn
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen
University of Aarhus, Denmark
Abstract
This article investigates whether local governments are able to act in a unified manner
when responding to reputational threats posed by negative media coverage. Based on
an argument that local governments facing political instability are less able to perform in
unison, the article investigates a number of expectations, including various types of
political instability (council, agenda and policy area instability) and their relation to
different types of responses to negative media coverage from the political and admin-
istrative actors (communication behaviour, responsibility and blame-avoidant behaviour,
and sanctioning behaviour). The article finds such relationships for some of these
aspects. The analysis also indicates that the reputational history of a local government
is related to the degree of unified behaviour. The empirical analysis is primarily based on
a survey sent to all Danish public managers in the three upper levels of the local
government hierarchy.
Point for practitioners
Reputation management has become an area for strategic management in the public
sector, not least in local governments. This article demonstrates that public managers
need to pay attention to the degree of political instability characterizing their local
governments when dealing with reputational threats. If the local government is char-
acterized by political instability, the need to address potential disagreements between
administrative and political actors becomes vital. Furthermore, public managers need to
take into account the reputational history of their organization as it may challenge the
ability to coordinate a unified response across the political and administrative leadership
during reputational threats.
Corresponding author:
Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen, Department of Management, Aarhus BSSAarhus University, Fuglesangs Alle´
48210 Aarhus V, Denmark.
Email: hhs@mgmt.au.dk
Grøn and Salomonsen
441
Keywords
local government, political–administrative relationships, political instability, public/
private organizations, reputation management
Introduction
Reputation management has become a managerial concern in public organizations
as part of efforts to handle external communications strategically (Carpenter and
Krause, 2012). For local governments in the Scandinavian context, this is partly to
be explained as a response to normative pressures from the environment, drawing
inspiration from generic theories of reputation management developed within the
context of private organizations (Nielsen and Salomonsen, 2012). Public and pri-
vate organizations are, however, to some extent, different (e.g. Bozeman and
Bretschneider, 1994), one of the primary differences between them being that
public organizations work under political authority. Departing from a dimensional
perspective on public–private organization differences, the article aims to investi-
gate the implications of political authority for local government organizations
performing reputation management as prescribed in generic reputation manage-
ment theory.
The fact that political organizations are ultimately headed by a political author-
ity does not prevent the intertwining of the political and administrative spheres.
Svara has conceptualized this as complementarity (Mouritzen and Svara, 2002), a
relationship in which ‘elected officials and administrators interact extensively but in
a way that preserves the unique contributions of each set of actors’ (Svara, 2006:
966).
In public organizations, the administrative top management collaborates with
the political executive – their ‘board’ – just as one would find to be the case for chief
executive officers (CEOs) and other top managers in a private organization.
In public organizations, this complementarity requires some measure of agreement,
both where the political and administrative roles overlap and when they are
distinct. The grey zone must have borders, so to speak, including a clear under-
standing concerning the politicians’ roles. In a representative democracy, polit-
icians are the ultimate accountable actor and should be willing to assume public
responsibility and eventually blame. Within the field of corporate communication
(Caroll, 2013: 3; Van Riel, 1995), effective reputation management rests on the
assumption that unified (communication) behaviour from the ‘corporate’ level is
of vital importance when organizations strive to manage their reputation
(Cornelissen, 2011: 5; Van Riel, 1995: 26; Van Riel and Fombrun, 2007: 26). If
the complementary politician–civil servant relation is characterized by disagree-
ment, responsibility avoidance and blame shifting, however, this premise is chal-
lenged. While this might be prevalent in public and private organizations alike, we
expect the differences between private and political boards to be of relevance when
442
International Review of Administrative Sciences 85(3)
assessing the challenges involved when performing unified reputation management
through strategic communication.
The article begins with the expectation that political instability reduces the cap-
acity of local government to act in a unified manner. Moreover, we argue this to be
particularly salient when public organizations are subject to reputational threats in
the form of negative media coverage. Fragile political coalitions, disagreement on
policies and shifting political agendas are less binding and result in less commit-
ment from politicians in terms of assuming their formal role as politically respon-
sible and accountable. This may lead to disagreements between the political and
administrative actors and ‘blame-gaming’ (Hood, 2011).
The article therefore asks: is political instability related to the extent to which
local government acts as a unified actor under reputational threats? It does so by
investigating how different aspects of political instability relate to how political and
administrative actors work together when facing reputational threats, more specif-
ically, in relation to agreements about who responds to the media – and how.
Second, we ask: how does political instability relate to responsibility avoidance,
blame shifting and sanctioning behaviour performed by the political actors vis-a-vis
the administration?
These questions are investigated in the context of Danish local government.
Previous research indicates that Danish municipalities provide for a least-likely
case (Andersen et al., 2012: 90) in terms of identifying instability due to the
strong norm of consensus (Houlberg and Pedersen, 2015). Furthermore, previous
studies show that a complementary relationship between the political and admin-
istrative actors is especially evident in the Danish context, as compared with similar
countries (Mouritzen and Svara, 2002). This also provides for a least-likely case in
terms of identifying disagreement and blame-gaming behaviours when responding
to reputational threats. Previous studies document how complementarity also
appears to prevail with respect to reputation management when reputational
threats are not imminent (Salomonsen and Nielsen, 2015). Hence, Danish local
governments represent a conservative choice of case.
The article is structured as follows: after presenting the theoretical framework,
the research context is presented, followed by a description of the research design
and methods. After presenting the empirical findings, the article concludes with a
discussion of the implications of these findings for assessing the conditions under
which public reputation management is performed in public sector organizations in
response to reputational threats, as well as the implications that this holds for
future cross-fertilization (Bozeman, 2013) between public and generic reputation
management theory.
Theoretical framework
The theoretical framework begins with a dimensional understanding of the differ-
ences between public and private organizations, followed by a presentation of the
Grøn and Salomonsen
443
generic reputation management theory, and a definition of political instability. The
theoretical section is rounded off by the presentation of a number of hypotheses.
A dimensional approach to the public–private organization divide
The debate about what constitutes the publicness of public organizations has
developed from a ‘core approach’ focusing on ownership to different dimensional
approaches (Bozeman, 1987, 2013; Bozeman and Bretschneider, 1994; Rainey,
2014). Whereas the degree of distinctiveness of public organizations in the
dimensional approaches may be reflected in a number of aspects relating to their
environment, their formal organization and so on (Rainey, 2014), the fact that
public organizations are ultimately led by a political authority is crucial for under-
standing why ‘[t]he public sector is a very particular place, with some special
characteristics’ (Pollitt, 2003: 4), and why we expect political boards to constitute
a distinct challenge for public organizations when they engage in reputation man-
agement through the use of strategic communications.
...
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