Abstract:
This paper provides a comparative analysis of the public service motivation of the mayors and high-ranking public managers in local government.
Public service motivation has been a very successful concept within Public Administration research in recent decades in terms of being utilized and analyzed in a number of papers in an increasingly international and sophisticated literature – both in terms of empirical and theoretical sophistication (Perry, Hondeghem, & Wise, 2010).
In spite of its initial formulations (Perry & Wise, 1990) intending to cover the entire public sector, it has however primarily been examined at the level of public sector street-level bureaucrats such as teachers, physiotherapists, dentist, etc. and rarely at the top of the hierarchy of the public sector.
In this paper, we explore how hierarchy and the long but different career paths of top politicians and top civil servants may influence their public service motivation. We review the sparse literature on both the link between public service motivation and hierarchical position, and the public service motivation of high-ranking political and administrative officials in the public sector.
We then analyze the antecedents of public service motivation of mayors and high-ranking public managers in Danish local government by means of survey data from 2016 (Bertelsen & Hansen, 2016a, 2016b), descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analysis.
The most important findings in the study are that the level, nature and antecedents of public service motivation do not differ significantly between political and administrative local government elites. On the contrary, our results point to a high degree of consensus among the political and administrative elites in local government in regards to what motivates them. Both mayors and high-ranking public managers display comparatively high levels of “Commitment to public interest” and “Attraction to policy making”.
Bertelsen, T. M., & Hansen, M. B. (2016a). Den danske borgmester - Afrapportering fra den danske del af forskningsprojektet : Politiske ledere i europæiske byer.
Bertelsen, T. M., & Hansen, M. B. (2016b). Kommunernes administrative lederskab anno 2016.
Perry, J. L., Hondeghem, A., & Wise, L. R. (2010). Revisiting the Motivational Bases of Public Service Motivation: Twenty Years of Research and an Agenda for the Future. Public Administration Review, 70(5), 681–690. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2010.02196.x
Perry, J. L., & Wise, L. R. (1990). The Motivational Bases of Public Service. Public Administration Review, 50(3), 367–373.
