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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the new public management (NPM) literature by investigating how politicians and managers perceive their relationships and respective roles during the accounting cycle and using multiple cases of Italian local government (LGs).

Drawing on public administration and public management literature, the paper depicts models of interaction between managers and politicians through the analysis of the cases of five Departments in three Italian LGs.

Results show that, in contrast with NPM claims, no model of neat separation between politicians and managers can be depicted in the analyzed cases. Rather, alternatively patterns of sequential or reciprocal integration emerge, together with some cases of “confusion”.

Further research is needed in order to investigate the factors that can explain the types of interactions and roles.

The paper fills the gap in NPM literature that gives scant importance to the political dimension and its relationship with management in public organizations. It addresses the diversity in the perceptions of politicians and managers as to their roles and relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the fundamental difference between private and public procurement, that of politicians, has been largely overlooked in public procurement strategy and management research. It then aims to argue that existing public procurement research could be improved if greater attention were given to in research design to validity and the interface with politicians.

The research is based on a critical literature review of public procurement strategy and management literature, examining the methodologies used and roles of politicians.

The findings suggest there is an in‐built bias through over reliance on procurement managers as the key respondents, tendency to focus on private sector procurement research attributes and questions, and a tendency to focus on operational as opposed to strategic public procurement decision making.

The research suggests a need for greater understanding of politicians' engagement in public procurement strategy and management and the need for greater triangulation in public procurement research.

The paper highlights how public procurement strategy and management research can be improved to increase its validity. It explores the neglected area of the role of politicians in public procurement.

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).

This chapter examines one of the most contested issues in Public Administration, namely political–administrative relationships. The first part of the chapter begins with a brief overview of the features of an ideal-type bureaucracy. Next is a literature review of political–administrative relationships. This is followed by an analysis of typologies of political–administrative relationships, with particular reference to developing countries. The second part of the chapter analyses the evolution of political–administrative relationships since the dawn of South African democracy in 1994. It examines the growing politicisation of the public service, the weakening of the powers of public officials vis-a-vis Ministers and the emasculation of the PSC. Data indicate that the government is unable to fill posts at the Senior Management Service (SMS) level and that there are a high number of acting HoDs, an indicator of instability. Finally, it uses Dasandi and Esteve’s typology of political–administrative relationships in developing countries to interpret the South African case.

This study aims to investigate the moderating effect of independent directors on the relationship between politicians on the board and corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD).

The ordinary least square has been used to analyze the CSRD data collected from the annual reports of all 30 listed banks of Bangladesh covering six years period ranging from 2013–2018. Further, the study has applied the generalized method of moments to prove the robustness of the model across the endogeneity issue.

The study found a positive relationship between board independence and CSRD that indicates board independence enhances the CSRD to a great extent. On the contrary, the inclusion of politicians on the board has shown a negative impact on CSRD that implies the higher the presence of political members on the board of a bank, the lower the involvement of the bank in CSR activities. However, board independence positively and significantly moderates the politician directors on the CSRD. The findings imply that if the independent directors are empowered, they play the role of whistleblowers that, in turn, mitigates the negative role of politician directors to CSRD.

The study suggests the banks’ management, and regulatory bodies formulate sound policies so that the banks are forced to include more independent directors with enough power and at the same time, reduce the politician directors on the board.

The study extends debate on the political CSR and CSRD through validating the role of board independence.

The purpose of this paper is to assess, empirically, the opinions of local politicians concerning citizen participation in collaborative governance processes. Elected politicians play a key role as gatekeepers when it comes to the political impact of participatory initiatives, and by examining their attitudes, it is possible to get an understanding of perceived challenges from the perspective of elected representatives.

The empirical findings come from an ongoing project studying democratic innovation, the primary objective of which is to understand how local politicians think about efforts to increase or deepen citizen participation in political decision making. The source of data is interviews with 29 members of the executive boards of four Norwegian municipalities.

Although most of the politicians acknowledge that good reasons exist to facilitate greater citizen involvement, they are particularly worried about figuring out how to realise “inclusiveness” and “popular control” as two democratic goods. They appear to think most people are not motivated to participate; thus, they do not think it is possible or desirable to interact more directly with citizens in collaborative processes to develop shared recommendations for new solutions to public problems.

The municipalities in this study are not a representative sample of Norwegian municipalities, as each has expressed an interest in democratic innovation. Thus, they would be expected to have more positive attitudes than the average municipality.

Given that elected representatives decide whether and how to involve citizens in political decision-making processes, their attitudes are crucial to understanding and explaining collaborative governance efforts in western democracies.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe main obstacles for politicians when dealing with healthcare priority setting.

The study had an exploratory descriptive design based on interviews with 18 politicians from two different county councils in Sweden. The interviews were analyzed using inductive qualitative content analysis.

The politicians highlighted the importance of, and difficulties in, communicate political missions; the politicians in this study saw the media as not always being fair watchdogs, implying that possibly important but unpopular prioritizing decisions were not made because of the risks of being badly reported and therefore not re-elected. Breaking up established structures in care practice is difficult and change takes time, partly because of existing higher level financing and rules and the system’s traditional separation of facilities and services. Although the politicians highlighted their limited power to influence and control resource allocation they could give small and “lower profile”, low-prioritized disciplines control of their own budgets and base payments on the results the disciplines accomplished.

This study highlights the difficulties that politicians experience, for example, having to take unpleasant decisions and thereby run the risk of being scrutinized by media, which in turn could influence how effectively tax money is being used.

The notion that political marketing occurs only during formal campaign periods is discarded in the political marketing literature. Political campaigns, rather than being periodic, are “permanent”. Accordingly, the attention of political marketers must increasingly turn to the analysis of how and when politicians serve their communities or constituencies. Indeed, the kinds of services commonly associated with political influence and constituency activity indicate a convergence of politics and public sector service provision. In this essay, the nature and effects of constituency‐focused service delivery are examined as an integral part of political marketing.

The involvement of politicians in the introduction and use of financial management techniques in the public sector deserves more attention. This paper analyses the influence of members of Parliament (MPs) on the development of financial management regulations for Dutch central government executive agencies.

This paper uses desk research and analyses formal evaluation reports, as well as minutes of meetings of Parliament to analyse the influence of MPs on the changes in financial management regulations.

MPs' influence on the change of prescriptions seems to have been small. The authors observe that modifications were most often already formulated in general evaluation reports by the Ministry of Finance, in advance of parliamentary debates. The analysis also reveals that the criteria to be met by the executive agencies became more detailed in the initial years of the agency model and became more global in recent years.

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on the influence of politicians on financial management regulations.

The paper shows that the influence of MPs on the prescriptions is quite small in daily practice and therefore, their role in the legislative process, as far as financial management techniques are concerned, is limited.

The results show that politicians are both in charge of, as well as subject to NPM-inspired financial management regulations, whereas their influence on the rules is small. The authors advise to further analyse this, as well as to explore how their role can be enlarged.

The interplay between politicians and financial management techniques in general, and the influence of MPs on the legislative process in specific, is an underresearched area. This paper aims to contribute to this literature and shows that the influence of MPs on the development of financial management regulations is limited. Several changes were made in these prescriptions in a period of more than 25 years, whereas discussions in the Parliament hardly played a role in these modifications.

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.