We assume that participatory governance arrangements — where policy development includes citizens — help strengthen elected officials’ leadership capacity. But do they really? That’s the question at the core of a new paper from Marte Winsvold and Signy Irene Vabo published last month in Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions.
Winsvold and Vabo define political leadership as an activity that involves helping a group of people “create and realize commonly shared goals.”
In a democracy, the authors believe, “it is vital that the elected representatives, who manage the community’s shared resources, have the capacity to exercise political leadership, as the lack of leadership capacity would prevent the community from developing in a collectively defined direction.”
They say political leadership includes identifying issues that need addressing through collective action; finding solutions to communal problems; and gathering support for implementation of policies.
They take a mixed methods approach and use a survey of over 2000 Norwegian local councilors from municipalities and subsequent case studies looking at two municipalities.
“Politicians were especially ambivalent about interactive arrangements that might interrupt the traditional way of ‘doing political leadership.'”
“Norwegian local governments have a broad responsibility for welfare services in a highly decentralized social–democratic welfare state,” the authors explain. “Hence, Norwegian local governments represent vital political systems where the effect of participatory governance arrangements on political leadership matters; therefore, they are suitable as cases for investigating the relationship between such arrangements and political leadership.”
Norway it is, then.
“Giving Power Away”
The authors found that, in fact, sharing power through interactive arrangements, where politicians and citizens work together to develop policies, is actually associated with lower perceptions of political leadership capacity than “giving power away through distributive arrangements,” where groups of citizens are delegated political competencies.
Politicians were especially ambivalent about interactive arrangements that might interrupt the traditional way of “doing political leadership.” And the lowered perception for political leadership capacity was tied to the reality that, in interactive arrangements, politicians are still responsible for matters over which they no longer have control.
Case studies as well as statistical analysis revealed that “politicians in the interactive municipality felt that the interactive participatory governance arrangements somewhat detracted from their ability to set agenda, whereas politicians in the distributive municipality believed that the distributive arrangement left their agenda-setting abilities untouched.”
The authors conclude that the apparent perception of sharing power is more disempowering than giving power away.
The authors suggest two mechanisms account for this. First, that the obligation “to share power with citizens prevented politicians in the interactive municipality from acting in line with the norms of representative democracy.”
Second, that “in the interactive setting, the loss of power was more visible to politicians, because they were continuously and actively engaged in the process of sharing it.”
While the authors feel that their study offers an important contribution to our understanding of participatory government arrangements, they feel future research should look further at other contextual factors that may come into play with perceptions of political leadership.
