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This study analyses to what extent politicians use public sector entities' financial statements along with the politicians' perceptions of the usefulness of such statements in the politicians' decision-making. The authors analyze financial statements' use and usefulness when the statements are prepared on a modified accrual basis and in the setting where there is the intention of full accrual accounting adoption. In addition, this study provides information about the use of the individual components of financial statements and investigates the reasons why the statements may not be used.

This study was conducted using a questionnaire. The authors surveyed politicians that are members of Croatian public sector bodies. To conduct this research, the politicians were contacted by telephone over the period from February to April 2022.

The findings of this study are of potential interest to researchers, regulators and policy makers. The findings show that most politicians use financial statements, but the politicians' perception of the statements' usefulness when the statements are prepared on a modified accrual accounting basis is greater than the politicians' actual use of the statements. The findings also show that in the process of making decisions, politicians use the selected financial statements that contain information of interest to the politicians; that the politicians tend to gravitate to the use of reports on revenue, expenses, receipts and expenditure prepared on modified accrual bases which are closer to budgetary reporting; that the politicians use the information that supports the politicians' sphere of responsibility as enforced by legislation.

This study provides insights into the use and usefulness of financial statements in public sector setting where modified accrual accounting is used to prepare the statements and reports. This study provides additional evidence on the significance of legal setting to the financial reporting in public sector.

The study aims to examine the validity of the gender affinity effect on social media throughout election campaigns.

This paper examines the role of gender in political discourse, using citizens' conversations on Facebook in the days leading up to Israel's 2021 elections as its case study. The analysis measured the engagement generated by male and female politicians in citizens' publicly open Facebook discussions (N = 1875) using a trend-tracking software. The analysis uses t-tests to examine differences in engagement between conversations about male versus female politicians and between posts written by male versus female authors. In addition, a two-way ANOVA analysis was conducted in an attempt to understand the shared impact of both the politicians' gender and posts authors' gender on the posts' engagement.

The study reveals that although more posts discuss male politicians, posts dealing with female politicians expressed significantly more support towards those politicians. The analysis also highlights that women tend to write more supportive posts and that most of their posts deal with female politicians. Furthermore, interaction effect analysis revealed that women's posts about female politicians generate more engagement in terms of likes, comments and number of participants than posts written by women that deal with male politicians.

The findings should encourage women politicians to run their campaigns via social media.

The study presents the first social media analysis for gender affinity effect and highlights the importance of the effect in online political communication studies.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2022-0199

Today, appearance is an integral aspect of a politician's image and personality and therefore his or her brand (Budesheim & DePaola, 1994; Sanghvi & Hodges, 2015; Smith & French, 2009). While appearance is critical to political marketing, most of the research focusing on appearance in politics is experimental in nature (Lenz & Lawson, 2011; Olivola & Todorov, 2010; Todorov et al., 2005). This study investigates the importance of appearance for marketing politicians through a qualitative interpretivist framework that offers implications for theory. Moreover, this chapter offers a specific focus on the importance of appearance for female politicians.

Research shows women face greater scrutiny on their appearance (Carlin & Winfrey, 2009; Sanghvi, 2018). This chapter examines myriad of issues women in politics face based on their appearance. It also examines how women have successfully managed the issue of appearance at local, state and national levels. Thus, this study delivers a multifaceted view of the topic and facilitates the understanding of how appearance management enters into the political marketing process.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise our understanding of public value accounting (PVA) by studying the use and usefulness of performance measurements (PM) as a management tool. The authors do this from a perspective in which they address the complexity of various (sometimes conflicting) assessments of performance measurement and management (PMM) by different stakeholders.

An interpretative case study using qualitative methods. The paper is based on 30 interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 with respondents working with PMM at different levels, such as politicians, officials and health-care professionals. The study context was Region Stockholm (RS) in Sweden and its health-care division.

PMs become an instrumental tool for PMM, which led to output being promoted above outcome. The authors show that there is a conceptual shortcoming in the discussion of PVA, as the effort needed to achieve outcome-based information might exceed the ability of an organisation to deliver it. The authors address the importance of studying the interaction among different stakeholders, including politicians, the public and media, in research on PVA, as well as possible power relationships among stakeholders.

The authors contribute to the growing research on PVA and its call for more empirical research by offering a more nuanced interpretation of PVA activities. The authors do this by studying PMM and the nature of these activities in a public sector organisation from a multiple-stakeholder perspective.

This chapter examines how elected politicians exercise their role as leaders (managers) of public services by employing three concepts: accountability, trust and authenticity. Political leaders have an obligation to their electors and the public services that they lead. Lord German examines this dual accountability. He maintains that the mediation of political power and leadership through interaction with a permanent civil service offers a rich field for interdisciplinary research. He suggests that authenticity in the political sphere has two dimensions which may not align: political authenticity and organisational authenticity. Lord German argues that both of these offer potential for research and the reinterpretation of authenticity in the political arena.

This paper analyses the degree of political decentralisation and its relation to the local councils in Tanzania. It explores the institutional and political set-up of the local councils originating from the degree of political decentralisation and how it influences the tension between the bureaucrats and local politicians.

Qualitative approach by a comparative case study is adopted to investigate the phenomenon in two local governments in Tanzania. The data were collected through interviews with 37 senior local government officials and eight focus group discussions with 48 administrators and councillors.

The findings indicate that the two local governments are subjected to a similar political system guided by similar rules and guidelines from the central government bureaucracy for implementing the party manifesto and central government priorities. Thus, the local politicians have little room for negotiation in adopting local agenda to reflect the preferences of the local community. Any attempt to challenge this status quo creates political tensions between bureaucrats and the administrators.

The findings provide invaluable insights to different stakeholders such as political scientists, government officials, and policymakers with interests in research or practice of political decentralization and political-administrative relation.

Social media has become an indispensable part of modern politics. Its rise in the political arena has coincided with the decline in trust toward mainstream media. Today, more than half of the population gets their political news and information through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Social media offers a great marketing opportunity to politicians as they allow them to bypass traditional media and communicate directly with voters, engage citizens during campaign and noncampaign periods, and create a brand image. As social media's influence in politics grows, so has the research devoted to political marketing on social media. It is against this backdrop that this chapter is written, which provides readers with an overview of the academic domain and the current state of literature. The chapter highlights the various research areas that have been explored in the literature and the implications of social media for political marketing strategy, along with the domain's current limitations and possible avenues of further research.

This paper aims to investigate the prevalence of corruption in Ghana to understand how and why it has turned public procurement into a mere money-making scheme instead of a means to provide needed public goods and services.

The study focuses on Ghana as a case study and mobilizes the monetization of politics lenses. Data are collected via interviews with key officials across the procurement sector (including the government, donors and civil society), documents, documentaries and news articles.

The findings suggest that the increasing costs of elections and political financing coupled with the costs of vote-buying, which has become informally institutionalized, intensify corruption practices and, consequently, turns public procurement into a mere source of cash for political ends. Political appointments and legalized loopholes facilitate this by helping to nullify the safeguard accounting and other control institutions are designed to provide. Likewise, enduring poverty and rising inequality “force” citizens into a vote-buying culture which distorts democratic premises that may drive out unscrupulous politicians; thus, perpetuating capture schemes. Civil society's efforts to remedy these have had little success, and corruption and inequality remain rife.

The main practical implication of the study lies in the need for a gradual demonetization of elections, and the consideration of the fundamental function of public procurement as a policy instrument embedded in economic, social, cultural and environmental plans. Additionally, given the connectedness of the various corruption issues raised, a comprehensive system-based approach in dealing with them would be more effective than a piecemeal approach targeting each issue/problem in isolation.

While extant literature has examined the issue of endemic corruption in developing countries using state capture, few have attempted to explain why it remains enduring, particularly in public procurement. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature on corruption and state capture theoretically and empirically by drawing on monetization of politics from political science to explain why corruption and state capture endure in certain contexts (with Ghana as an illustrative example) which reduce public procurement to a cash-milking scheme.

One of the significant components of a firm's overall sustainability is establishing and nurturing governance. This study attempts to understand how politically connected firms maintain sustainability measures in terms of risk-taking strategies. This paper has two purposes. The first purpose is to provide empirical evidence on the politically connected (PC) firms' corporate risk-taking and performance. The second purpose is to investigate the moderating impact of PC firms' risk on corporate performance.

To conduct the analysis to test our hypothesis efficiently, data has been collected from Bloomberg and annual reports of all Malaysian PC and non-PC companies. The final sample comprises 561 firms over the investigation period 2010–2019. The methodology entails Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions of the impact of the PC firms on corporate risk-taking and performance. The authors also conduct t-tests of the equality of means of corporate risk-taking and performance between PC and non-PC companies.

The authors’ results show that politically connected firms undertake significant less corporate risk and relish higher financial performance than their counterparts. It implicatively insinuates that the presence of a politician on the board enables the management to mitigate the risk-taking, which makes the firms more profitable. The authors’ results corroborate network theory, suggesting that political ties alleviate the agency issue and safeguard the shareholders' interest.

The study's results were important as they highlighted the sustainable development of PC and non-PC companies, offering insights to researchers, policymakers, regulators, financial report users, investors, environmental unions, employees, clients and society.

This paper is novel since it is unique in evaluating sustainable practice in PC and non-PC firms.