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We examine the extent to which female politicians highlight their status as women by identifying with women as a group and using female roles and experiences to describe themselves. Based on a qualitative content analysis of female members’ congressional web pages, we find that sex-group identification and gender roles are selectively used in discussions of their personal lives, their paths to Congress, and their experiences within Congress. Variation among the female politicians suggests they are responding to a range of normative gender beliefs among the electorate. There is also evidence that some of the women use online forms of communication to change the discourse about women in politics.

We take as our point of departure Weber's well-known taxonomy of forms of authority (Weber, 1947; 1968). Traditional authority, which first of all characterizes pre-modern societies, is based on inherited privileges and positions. Legal authority, which is often termed rational and bureaucratic, is based on position and competence. In addition, it is impersonal. By contrast, charismatic authority is personal, not positional. It has one main feature, authority legitimated by the appeal of leaders who claim allegiance because of the force of their extraordinary personalities. Weber saw this kind of authority as liberation from the alienation, which the bureaucratic “iron cage” represented. The essence of charisma is a sort of life and vitality, which is the opposite of the formality of bureaucracy and the roles and conventions of traditional society (Weber, 1968, p. 24). Consequently, charisma implies a sort of renewal. According to one of Weber's most heavily quoted passages, charisma is based on “the devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him” (Weber, 1968, p. 46). The charismatic leader has, in other words, exceptional qualities and is accordingly “set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities” (Weber, 1968, p. 48).

Political communication is not first and foremost about truth; it is a struggle for power and influence between different interests. In this struggle, it is critical for politicians to persuade voters, and not just by the power of their argument, but also, and increasingly, through creating trust by means of their personality. In this study we will focus on how politicians attend to these concerns in televised election campaign debates in the Nordic countries. Ideally, political debates provide politicians with equal opportunities for airing their positions. This linguistic ideal of fairness has more elaborate equivalents in established theories of discourse, such as the theory of the ideal speech situation proposed by Habermas (1975a, b), Paul Grice’s maxims for efficient and logical communication (Grice, 1975), and the face-saving traffic rules of social interaction analyzed by Goffman (1967). However, this rudimentary standard of fairness is rarely satisfied in practice (Gastil, 1992). Rather than granting all participants equality, debates often become events in which prior inequalities, such as gender, age, class and status, are re-enacted (Edelsky & Adams, 1990). The question we are pursuing in this article is whether and how such “brought along” features are made relevant, or “brought about” in actual debate situations.

Although Danish democracy is not currently facing the same decline in the trust in politicians and government as seen in other countries, it faces some of the same destabilising forces as do other ‘old’ representative democracies. While the various forms of citizen participation introduced in the 1980s and 1990s enhanced politician–citizen tensions, we are currently witnessing a wave of highly innovative, hybrid forms of democracy that both integrate representative and direct forms of democracy and push elected politicians towards an interactive political leadership style. These hybrid forms provide occasion for citizens and politicians to meet and debate pressing political matters. Although we are still in early days and dilemmas remain to be addressed, this development holds considerable potential for democracy in Denmark and elsewhere.

Through social media communities, politicians communicate personal or even private information and seek to take advantage of the possibilities to connect with both influential personalities and ordinary people. Politicians' Instagram use can be understood as a way of producing visual flows of professional, personal and private practices.

The current research seeks to compare the ways in which the leaders of the three major political parties in Greece (New Democracy, SYRIZA and KINAL) form their ‘image’ through their Instagram posts during a multiple consecutive elections (pre-)electoral period (2019 European, Prefectural/Municipal and general elections) and a nonelectoral period (2018), in order to trace similarities and differences in the communication strategies of the abovementioned politicians during these periods. Among others, politicians post private aspects of their lives during both periods; they focus predominantly on the formation of a positive self-image, instead of attacking their political opponents and increase the number of personal images during the (pre-)electoral period of our study.

The study contributes to the literature on public value and performance examining politicians’ and managers’ perspectives by investigating the importance they attach to the different facets of performance information (i.e. budgetary, accrual based- and non-financial information (NFI)).

We survey politicians and managers in all Italian municipalities of at least 80,000 inhabitants.

Overall, NFI is more appreciated than financial information (FI). Moreover, budgetary accounting is preferred to accrual accounting. Politicians’ and managers’ preferences are generally aligned.

NFI as a measure of public value is not alternative, but rather complementary, to FI. The latter remains a fundamental element of public sector accounting due to its role in resource allocation and control.

The preference for NFI over FI and of budgetary over accruals accounting suggests that the current predominant emphasis on (accrual-based) financial reporting might be misplaced.

Public value and performance are multi-faceted concepts. They can be captured by different types of information and evaluated according to different criteria, which will also depend on the category of stakeholders or users who assesses public performance. So far, most literature has considered the financial and non-financial facets of performance as virtually separate. Similarly, in the practice, financial management tends to be decoupled from non-financial performance management. However, this research shows that only by considering their joint interactions we can achieve an accurate representation of what public value really is.

This qualitative interview study compares public value prioritizations of ministers, members of parliament and senior public managers in the Netherlands. This article aims to answer the following central research question: how do Dutch political elites and administrative elites differ in their interpretation and prioritization of public values?

Based on coding and categorization of 65 interviews this article shows how government elites in advanced western democracies interpret and assess four crucial public values: responsiveness, expertise, lawfulness and transparency.

Political elites and administrative elites in the Netherlands are more similar than different in their prioritization and perceptions of public values. Differences are strongly related to role conceptions and institutional responsibilities, which are more traditional than most recent literature on politico-administrative dynamics would suggest.

Our qualitative findings are hard to generalize to larger populations of politicians and public managers in the Netherlands, let alone beyond the Netherlands. However, the testable research hypotheses we derive from our explorative study merit future testing among larger populations of respondents in different countries through survey research.

Experienced values differences between both groups are smaller than their mutual perceptions would suggest.

Most research on public values is quantitative in nature and focuses exclusively on public managers. By adding the politician to the equation we improve our understanding of how public values are enacted in real life and set the tone for a more inclusive research agenda on public values.

Ethical conduct by politicians involves more than respect for the law and adherence to rules governing conflicts of interest. It displays fidelity to a democratic ethos. In this chapter, I provide a characterization of the democratic ethos and sketch its connection to recent work in democratic theory. Second, I describe the sort of fidelity to the democratic ethos that is a condition of ethical conduct by politicians. Third, I suggest a mechanism through which greater adherence to a suitable version of the democratic ethos might be achieved.