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The study of organizational task for understanding how organizations behave and evolve has been one of the classic topics in organization theory and public administration. Reputation scholarship has appeared as a promising perspective to understand internal and external organizational dynamics. Reputation scholars, too, emphasize the critical importance of task. Despite this recognition, the literature is characterized by a lack of theorization, and large-scale comparative analyses on how task characteristics are related to reputational dynamics. This study aims to address these concerns, relying on an extensive longitudinal dataset on the media reputation of 40 agencies in two countries to explain organizations' likelihood of attracting reputational threats (both in general and targeting specific reputational dimensions) through different task characteristics. Our main finding is that as agencies perform tasks of a more coercive and authoritative nature (regulatory tasks and, to a lesser extent, redistributive tasks), they are more likely to attract reputational threats (both in general and to all dimensions).

Although journalism and media coverage are known to induce, inform, and affect public accountability processes, little is known about media-covered accountability. This study therefore explores accountability processes of Danish and Flemish agencies as subjects of the news. Drawing on news construction literature, our quantitative content analysis of newspaper coverage ( N = 13,540) focuses on the presence of accountability processes in media coverage and the extent to which organizational characteristics (task, political salience, and size) are related to this phenomenon. Horizontal accountability forums have the highest media presence. Opinions from horizontal forums, vertical forums, and citizens appear less frequently for service-providing organizations.

There is a huge gap between how employees see leaders’ behavior and how leaders see themselves regardless of sector and functional area. Because this gap can be a serious problem in managing organizations, scholars have investigated how the gap can be reduced. This article focuses on leadership training and tests whether and under what conditions it narrows the gap. Using quantitative and qualitative data from a randomized field experiment with several hundred Danish leaders from public and private organizations, we find that a yearlong leadership training course decreases the differences between leader and employee perceptions of transformational and transactional leadership behaviors in public sector organizations but not in private organizations. The findings imply that leadership training can be one way for public organizations to align perceptions of leadership.

Turnover among top executives in government organizations warrants our research interest because of their importance for executive politics, public policy, and the management and performance of public organizations. Whereas the literature so far has primarily studied political, organizational and individual antecedents of turnover, we focus on the relational level. Based on homosocial reproduction, relational demography and social identify theory, we hypothesize that demographic similarities between senior executives and their political counterparts influence executive turnover. Using longitudinal register data of Danish mayors and chief administrative officers (CAOs), our results suggest that gender dissimilarity (specifically, a male mayor and a female CAO) increases the risk of CAO turnover. Similarly, the risk of CAO turnover is higher when the CAO is older than the mayor. Contrary to expectations, however, differences in education reduces turnover risk (specifically when the CAO has more education than the mayor). Our study illustrates the relevance of understanding turnover as a relational phenomenon based on factors beyond rational, political, and functional explanations.

This conceptual article extends three ongoing scholarly debates on the mediatisation of politics – the risk of media centrism, the tendency to see mediatisation as a linear process, and the preoccupation with elected officials. We argue for the need to identify, foreground, and systematise non-media dimensions of mediatisation processes. We also argue that actors encounter mediatisation as a set of dynamic ideas rather than a fixed logic. With a focus on government agencies and a comparison of the politico-administrative systems in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, this article gives certain attention to politicisation, autonomy, and accountability and suggests that the degree of freedom granted to agencies in Denmark and Norway is relatively limited compared with agencies in Sweden. Consequently, we present two propositions: 1) agencies in Denmark and Norway are less inclined to mediatise, whereas 2) Swedish government agencies will more likely mediatise and show conformity with widely accepted norms regarding media.

Offentlige organisationer skal fortsat kunne realisere deres målsætninger under forandringer, og begrebet organisatorisk resiliens indfanger netop evnen til at gøre dette. Artiklen undersøger offentlige lederes handlinger rettet mod at fremme organisatorisk resiliens under drastiske forandringer. Baseret på 24 interviews med ledere og medarbejdere, der under coronakrisen arbejdede med kommunal sundhed og omsorg, belyser vi fire typer ledelseshandlinger i form af retningssætning, relationsunderstøttelse, refleksionsfacilitering samt rammesætning. Vi finder, at lederne især sætter retning via håndtering af konkrete modsatrettede hensyn, og at deres relationsunderstøttelse omfatter både medarbejdere og borgere. Lederne skaber i varierende grad anledninger til refleksion, hvor de enten selv faciliterer eller delegerer det, og der er eksempler på både ledercentrisme og selvorganisering i rammesætningen. De fire typer ledelseshandlinger sker i sammenhæng og spiller sammen med etablerede former for offentlig ledelse.

This article seeks to explain the frequency and tone of media attention for public organisations. Expectations are formulated on the impact of fundamental organisational features on the frequency and tone of coverage of public organisations. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyse the nuanced interplay between legal independence, primary task and organisational size. The results show that this configurational approach is necessary to understand which public organisations appear in the media and how. Legal independence, task and size do not operate independently, but combine in explaining the media attention for public organisations.

PurposeLeadership can cultivate shared understandings of goals within organizations. Transformational leaders engage in vision-sharing, whereas transactional leaders apply contingent rewards and sanctions. To set the stage for better performing organizations, public managers could lead in ways to improve the communication that flows internally in public organizations, defined as the internal communication performance. Previous studies have linked transformational leadership with internal communication performance in public organizations, but no studies have considered the broader array of leadership strategies and their combination. The purpose of this study is to assess the strength of the relationship between different forms of leadership (transformational and transactional) and internal communication.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a balanced panel dataset of 751 employees.FindingsThe analysis corroborates the existing findings of a relationship between transformational and internal communication, and it identifies a relationship between transactional leadership through verbal rewards and internal communication.Originality/valueIn so doing, the study brings new insights to our understanding of how leaders in public organizations can improve the internal communication in their organizations, which has been linked to, among others, how employees themselves perceive the red tape and performance within public organizations.

What has shaped the different responses to COVID-19? The orthodoxy in the crisis management literature holds that the response to events like COVID-19 is primarily shaped by a decentralized group of actors on the ground. In this paper, we argue that a top-down explanation, focused on the actions and intentions of the core executive, is an essential complement to this bottom-up emphasis on a distributed network. Specifically, we advance a 'court politics’ understanding of how governing elites have taken advice and made decisions, and sketch out the impact this has had in framing and constraining crisis response efforts. The argument uses an interpretive framework centred on the dilemmas that governing elites face in managing crisis. We illustrate the underlying 'court politics' which has driven responses to COVID-19 in England and Denmark. We show that pathologies and dysfunctions in Johnson’s court have filtered through into inertia and indecisiveness, while the centralization of authority in Frederiksen’s court has enabled swift and decisive intervention. Our analysis shows that a top-down emphasis on executive government – and the ‘court politics’ therein – offers a fruitful agenda for understanding and comparing COVID-19 crisis response.

Reputation scholars have convincingly demonstrated the relevance of understanding the behavior of government agencies as motivated by reputational concerns. Yet we must still expand our understanding of how agency audiences pass reputational judgments. Combining insights from bureaucratic reputation theory with psychological theories (motivated reasoning and attribution theory), this article theorizes and tests whether agencies’ reputational histories increase the likelihood of receiving positive or negative newspaper coverage. Our findings are based on an extensive coding of 11,041 newspaper articles over a 10-year period in Denmark and Flanders (Belgium) regarding 40 agencies. We introduce a measure of reputational history from communication studies. The analysis identifies that both negative and positive reputational histories are related to the valence of newspaper coverage, suggesting that the past reputations of agencies are part of the cognitive basis upon which audiences form reputational judgment.

This article applies the ideas of the core executive and court politics to Danish coalition and minority governments. It asks two questions. Do these ideas travel beyond their Westminster origins? What are the dilemmas confronting the Danish executive and its court politics? The analysis is based on documentary sources and 22 elite interviews with cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries. It identifies a duopoly of Prime Minister and Minister of Finance as a distinctive variety of court politics. It identifies the key dilemmas confronted by the Danish executive; namely trust, political support and politicization. It concludes that court politics provides unique insights into the workings of Danish government. The article is a contribution to the comparative analysis of the court politics of governing elites. It shows that the focus on court politics is not only useful for majoritarian Westminster systems but also for the analysis of consensual parliamentary democracies.

With the Danish civil service coming out on top in numerous international ratings, it seems worthwhile considering what characterizes the way it works and the central institutions on which it is built. In this chapter, we argue that the Danish central government is built on a relatively weak, formally institutionalized foundation. Rather, we argue that when looking at questions such as formal organization and interactions between politicians and civil servants, we find pragmatic solutions to some of the central challenges. In terms of the size and organization of central government, we find a number of different solutions. In addition, we find an ongoing adjustment of the way civil servants and politicians interact. We discuss this finding and argue that such a pragmatic approach may come with many advantages in terms of day-to-day effectiveness and responsiveness to changing political needs. However, it also demands a lot from the political and administrative actors in the system to ensure that pragmatism does not turn into ‘anything goes’.

This article investigates trust between politicians and public officials in local government. Beginning with Svara’s claim that such relations are characterized by complementarity, we point to the importance of trust as the micro foundation for these relationships. Applying a mixed-methods strategy, we investigate a number of factors we expect to be related to the level of trust between politicians and public officials, as perceived by the latter. We find that the communication climate and a clear distribution of tasks correlate positively with trust, whereas an unstable environment correlates negatively with trust.

Public organizations must keep attaining their goals during changes, and the concept of organizational resilience describes this ability. The article examines public managers’ leadership behaviors focused on promoting organizational resilience during drastic changes. Based on 24 interviews with public managers and professionals who worked with public health and elderly care during the Covid-19 pandemic, we shed light on four leadership behaviors aimed at ensuring organizational resilience: setting direction, supporting relations, facilitating reflections, and clarifying the rules of the game. We find that public managers particularly set direction by balancing opposing considerations in the daily work, and that their support of relations includes both employees and citizens. The managers facilitate opportunities to reflect differently with variation in whether they initiate and/or participate in the reflection process themselves. The rules of the game are changed toward either leader-centrism or self-governance (away from decision-making with both leader and employee participation). The four types of leadership behaviors are interrelated and interact with established types of leadership behaviors.

This article investigates whether local governments are able to act in a unified manner when responding to reputational threats posed by negative media coverage. Based on an argument that local governments facing political instability are less able to perform in unison, the article investigates a number of expectations, including various types of political instability (council, agenda and policy area instability) and their relation to different types of responses to negative media coverage from the political and administrative actors (communication behaviour, responsibility and blame-avoidant behaviour, and sanctioning behaviour). The article finds such relationships for some of these aspects. The analysis also indicates that the reputational history of a local government is related to the degree of unified behaviour. The empirical analysis is primarily based on a survey sent to all Danish public managers in the three upper levels of the local government hierarchy. Point for practitioners Reputation management has become an area for strategic management in the public sector, not least in local governments. This article demonstrates that public managers need to pay attention to the degree of political instability characterizing their local governments when dealing with reputational threats. If the local government is characterized by political instability, the need to address potential disagreements between administrative and political actors becomes vital. Furthermore, public managers need to take into account the reputational history of their organization as it may challenge the ability to coordinate a unified response across the political and administrative leadership during reputational threats.

Ministers increasingly rely on advisers for support and advice. In many countries, these political aides are labelled differently. Generally, they serve as close confidants to their political masters and operate in the ‘shadowland’ between politics and bureaucracy. Scholarship has dragged the ministerial advisers out of the dark and described their background and functions. Still, the field of scholarship has a Westminster bias, is characterized by single case studies, and remains under-theorized. The lack of comparative focus and theoretical underpinnings can be explained by the complex nature of ministerial advisers. This introductory article suggests a definition for ministerial advisers and reviews the extant literature on these important actors. The main argument is that the extent and relevance of ministerial advisers in executive government merits integration into mainstream public administration and political science theory and research.

Ministerial advisers are said to strengthen the political control of bureaucracy. Using a comparative case design, this article investigates this claim by studying the roles of ministerial advisers in government coordination in Denmark and Sweden. The article demonstrates how the roles of advisers differ in coordination: Swedish advisers directly control government coordination through hierarchical authority. The roles of advisers and bureaucrats are functionally differentiated in coordination. In contrast, Danish advisers play a more indirect role in coordination. Rather than controlling coordination, they serve to reproduce the functional politicization of the permanent bureaucracy in government coordination. The findings underline the relevance of including advisers in the future study of government coordination. The analysis is based on 48 interviews with advisers and top civil servants in Denmark and Sweden.

Turnover among executives warrants our research interest both out of functional and political reasons. Whereas the literature so far has primarily been interested in explanations at the organizational and individual level, we theorize the relationship between senior executives and their political counterparts using social identity theory, social comparison theory and social network theory and present competing hypotheses regarding the effects of demographic similarities and dissimilarities on turnover. Using register longitudinal data of Danish mayors and CAO’s we find that greater age differences increase the likelihood of CAO turnover as does similar educational levels. We argue that our study illustrates the relevance of understanding turnover as a relational phenomenon based on factors beyond rational, political and functional explanations.

A key argument in recent theorizing on the drivers of bureaucratic behaviour is that agencies seek to establish and maintain a unique reputation. While recent years have witnessed substantial empirical support for this claim, the field lacks comparative examinations of the dynamics of reputation and its management throughout crisis periods. This article draws on a systematic media content analysis to explore the exposure and communication responses of the German, Belgian and Danish financial regulators to reputational threats before, during, and after the financial crisis. Our results point at the dynamic and context-sensitive nature of reputation management. Ein zentrales Argument der aktuellen Literatur zu bürokratischem Entscheidungsverhalten lautet, dass Behörden danach streben, eine einzigartige Reputation zu erlangen und aufrechtzuerhalten. Diese Aussage wurde in den vergangenen Jahren in zahlreichen empirischen Studien bestätigt. Allerdings liegen bislang keine vergleichenden Analysen vor, die sich mit der Veränderung bürokratischer Reputation und dem Reputationsmanagement in Krisenzeiten auseinandersetzen. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht auf der Grundlage einer systematischen Medienanalyse, welchen reputationsbezogenen Bedrohungen die Finanzmarktbehörden in Deutschland, Belgien und Dänemark vor, während und nach der Finanzkrise ausgesetzt waren und wie diese hierauf mit Hilfe öffentlicher Kommunikation reagiert haben. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Reputationsmanagement zeitlichen Schwankungen unterliegt und kontextabhängig ist.

This is an original manuscript / preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Local Government Studies on 10 Jan 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2018.1560270 . This article investigates reputation reform in Norwegian and Danish local government and whether they have the same strategy content depending on the degree of administrative involvement and municipality size. Political and administrative actors are likely to cultivate different types of reputation strategies (place or organisational reputation), which explicitly embrace the potentially diverging interests cultivated by the two types of actors. We use a comparative design and quantitative method with an empirical ambition to explore local government reputation strategies in two national contexts. We find that local government responses to reputation reform depend on the size of the municipality and the type of actors involved; the larger the municipality, the more the administration is involved. And the more that administrative actors are involved, the more the strategies target organisational reputation. The country-specific factors do not appear to be the most important determinants for reputation reform strategies.

Existing conceptualizations and measures of transformational and transactional leadership have unclear theoretical bases, confound leadership and its effects, and are not necessarily suitable for public organizations. Overcoming these problems is necessary to test how leadership affects performance. Many public administration scholars apply the concepts, emphasizing the need to ensure that the concepts are applicable in both public and private organizations. The article reconceptualizes transformational and transactional leadership and develops and tests revised measures that can be employed on employees and leaders, are robust in terms of repeated use by the same respondents, and are applicable to public and private organizations alike.

This article investigates the involvement of permanent civil servants in strategic communication in government organizations within the context of mediatized democracies. Based upon an argument that the involvement in strategic communication is to be seen as part and parcel of a functional politicization of the civil service, the article identifies a significant and positive relationship between media awareness and functional politicization across the ministerial hierarchy as well as between media pressure and functional politicization, although moderated by organizational level and position. Based upon these empirical findings, the article demonstrates how strategic communication for pursuing and achieving political ends in central governments involves a permanent civil service aware of and positioned in organizations subject to pressures from the news media. The article discusses how these findings relate to different perspectives on strategic communication in central government organizations and identifies the need for mediatization research to re-emphasize central government organizations as organizations in their own right but just as importantly as an instrument for governments. Furthermore, the article points out the relevance for including non-elected actors into the research on political communication from politicians once elected into offices. The empirical analysis is performed in the context of Danish central government organizations.

Neutrality has traditionally been considered a key trait of the civil service in Western democracies. The conception of the neutral bureaucracy is closely linked to the notion of the prominent politics–administration dichotomy of the two spheres of politics and administration, as advocated by Max Weber (1980) and Woodrow Wilson (1887). According to conventional wisdom, the firm and encompassing implementation of the merit principle realises the idea of a neutral bureaucracy. In that respect, neutrality and merit-based recruitments are often considered the opposite of politicisation. Conventionally, a neutral bureaucracy is considered to assure competence and immunity against opportunistic ideas brought in by volatile, sometimes erratic political leadership. Because elected politicians come and go with elections, they cannot ensure that political decisions are carried out based on the ‘best’ available knowledge. In that sense, bureaucrats are conceived as neutral, obedient servants that subordinate their behaviour to the will of political masters, to the law and the common good. However, there is no strict politics–administration dichotomy in contemporary politico-administrative systems. Empirical findings from the late 1970s onwards demonstrated that bureaucrats are by no means as neutral and ‘apolitical’ as assumed, but rather remarkably involved in political processes. This chapter discusses the literature on neutral competence and presents an empirical analysis of Danish and British civil servants’ accounts of neutrality. This chapter concludes by suggesting the concept of competent neutrality and discussing implications for our understanding of bureaucratic neutrality.

Meme si la politisation est un eternel theme de recherche dans l’administration publique lorsqu’il s’agit d’etudier les relations entre les ministres et les agents de l’Etat, le concept est encore peu precis. Avec le present article, nous entendons enrichir cette litterature en epinglant differentes conceptualisations de la politisation. Nous proposons par ailleurs une typologie comprenant trois mecanismes de politisation visant a renforcer la reactivite politique de la bureaucratie ministerielle : la politisation formelle, fonctionnelle et administrative. La typologie est validee sur le plan empirique au moyen d’une analyse de cas comparative des mecanismes de politisation en Allemagne, en Belgique, au Royaume-Uni et au Danemark. L’analyse empirique affine encore l’idee generale selon laquelle les democraties occidentales deviennent « tout simplement » plus politisees, puisqu’elle indique que certains mecanismes de politisation, plutot que de continuer a se renforcer, se stabilisent – du moins pour l’instant.Remarques a l’intention des praticiensOn entend souvent dire dans les recherches et la pratique administrative que la politisation augmente dans les rapports entre les ministres et les agents de l’Etat. La neutralite absolue de la bureaucratie etant davantage un mythe qu’une realite empirique, les democraties sont toutes obligees de concilier les revendications en faveur d’une expertise neutre et de reactivite politique. Celle-ci passe souvent par l’introduction de mecanismes de politisation. La politisation peut prendre toute une serie de formes et nous proposons, dans cet article, une typologie portant sur la politisation formelle, fonctionnelle et administrative. Nous verrons en outre comment les mecanismes de politisation non seulement se renforcent, mais aussi comment ils se developpent et interagissent, modifiant les equilibres faits de neutralite et de reactivite de maniere potentiellement contradictoire.

Based on the assumption that the identity and self-understanding of an academic discipline determines how it conceptualizes different domains of social reality, including how it imports and/or exports concepts from or to other disciplines, this chapter presents some of the findings of a major ongoing comparative and cross-disciplinary study of how five key concepts within the combined fields of crisis management and reputation management are applied in three different disciplinary contexts. In this chapter, however, the focus is on just one of these concepts: the concept of reputation.

Alors que les conseillers speciaux jouent un role important dans la plupart des gouvernements occidentaux, les recherches sur la question sont peu nombreuses. Le present article entend expliquer les variations observees dans les relations de « menage a trois » entre les ministres, les hauts fonctionnaires et les conseillers speciaux dans deux systemes politico-administratifs differents. Le point de depart theorique consiste a conceptualiser et a expliquer ces relations trilaterales comme des « marches bureaucratiques » (Public Service Bargain) multiples. On constate que les differences entre les marches bureaucratiques donnent lieu a des differences dans ces menages a trois, ce qui se traduit par differents types de differentiation fonctionnelle ainsi que par des differences dans le degre de cooperation ou inversement de conflit. Ces differences sont avant tout le resultat de differences dans les interets ainsi que dans les regles formelles et institutionnelles et dans les competences des acteurs concernes. Les donnees empiriques comprennent des documents, ainsi que des entretiens avec des hauts fonctionnaires et des questionnaires completes par ceux-ci. Les pays compares sont la Belgique et le Danemark.Remarques a l’intention des praticiensNotre etude confirme qu’il est important que les « menages a trois » (ministres, conseillers speciaux et haute fonction publique (HFP) « ... definissent les termes du marche qui s’applique aux conseillers politiques (...) » (Hood et Lodge, 2006 : 128) afin de reguler la relation entre les conseillers speciaux et la HFP et d’eviter les conflits potentiels entre ceux-ci. L’etude fait en outre apparaitre que le nombre de beneficiaires d’une nomination politique influence la relation. Enfin, l’etude revele que l’existence de differences marquees dans les competences qu’apportent les deux types d’agents dans le marche permet d’assurer la cooperation et le respect mutuel, tandis que des competences qui se recouvrent partiellement risquent de donner lieu a des rivalites.

”Du afklarer dit ledelsesrum med den politiske leder.” Sådan lød den første anbefaling i kodekset for god offentlig topledelse i Danmark, da det blev udformet i 2005. Kodekset blev præsenteret som et forsøg på at gøre det klart, hvad der kendetegner ”forudsætning[erne] for at løfte de udfordringer, som den offentlige sektor står overfor i dag og i fremtiden” (Forum for Offentlig Topledelse 2005, 6). Der er nu gået 10 år, og i denne artikel afdækkes om afklaring af ledelsesrum faktisk er blevet et væsentligt element i samspillet mellem politikere og topembedsmænd. Artiklen er baseret på en spørgeskemaundersøgelse foretaget i foråret 2015. Centrale spørgsmåler, hvordan opgaver fordeles mellem topembedsmænd og politikere, hvor enige disse aktører er om ledelsesrummet,hvor ofte de diskuterer ledelsesrummet og endelig hvilken betydning organisationens omgivelser har for ledelsesrummet. Artiklen konkluderer, at ledelsesrummet langt fra altid afklares, men samtidig oplever størsteparten af de adspurgte ledere, at der er enighed mellem offentlige ledere og politikerne om ledelsesrummet. Samtidig ser vi, at omgivelsernes stabilitet spiller en væsentlig rolle i kommunerne. Her ser vi, at ustabile omgivelser medfører en større enighed mellem offentlige ledere og politikere om rollefordelingen.

The article investigates whether contracting process affects goal attainment in internal contracts. Based on literature on contracting and performance management, we deduce four hypotheses concerning contracting processes and goal attainment. The hypotheses are tested by studying contracts from all Danish agencies together with a survey and interviews with the heads of agencies. We find that dialogue and some autonomy in the contracting process increase goal attainment if balanced with hierarchical control. We also find that agreement between agencies and departments on performance demands and assessment criteria positively affect goal attainment.

The concept of public service bargain (PSB) has been reintroduced in recent times to the study of public administration to analyse the division of roles between ministers and the civil service in the context of public service reforms (Hood 2000, 2001, 2002; Hood and Lodge 2006). The empirical investigation of the concept of PSB in general and changes in PSBs in particular is, however, limited. This article addresses this limitation by investigating what causes changes in public service bargains, particularly with respect to the provision of advice. As argued by Hood, we demonstrate how changes in PSBs can be explained by a combination of changes in the environments of ministries as well as the interests of the political actors. Furthermore, we point to the professional qualifications of civil servants as well as their interests as causes of change which, until now, have not received sufficient attention in the PSB literature. The article is based on a longitudinal case study of PSB between ministers and the permanent civil service in Denmark.

Danish permanent secretaries, top civil servants in the Danish state administration, are formally both administrative heads of their ministries as well as prime advisers to Danish ministers. In this article we analyse whether and how the public service bargain (PSB) (Hood and Lodge, 2006) of Danish permanent secretaries primarily reflects elements of a managerial role as prescribed in many of the New Public Management reforms or whether their role as policy adviser is as important as their role as manager, as is formally prescribed. The PSB is assessed in terms of the typology of Hood and Lodge, including the dimensions: reward, competency, loyalty and responsibility. The analysis demonstrates that although elements of a managerial bargain have entered the role of Danish permanent secretaries, it is not more salient than the advisory aspect of the PSB.

The Council of Ministers is an important part of EU decision-making. However, contrary to what is formally expected member, states are not always represented by ministers at Council meetings. Unfortunately, our knowledge of who is actually participating is limited. First, the article investigates the extent to which ministers actually participate in Council meetings. We conclude that a substantial number of the participants are not ministers. Second, based on an institutional approach, the article tests six hypotheses as to when ministers participate. Here, we find the salience of meetings, the importance of the policy area, the length of EU membership and a high share of EU-positive parties enhance the likelihood of ministerial participation. Finally, we test whether the existence of junior ministers affects the likelihood of politicians participating. Here, our findings are inconclusive. The article builds on a database including all participants in Council meetings between 2005 and 2009.

Er kvindelige universitetsansatte mere orienteret mod at hjælpe den enkelte studerende end deres mandlige kolleger, og giver de derfor bedre karakterer? Artiklen undersøger dette i en panelundersøgelse af bedømmelsesadfærd på to danske universitetsinstitutter mellem 2004 og 2010. På baggrund af spørgeskemaer fra 78 universitetslærere kombineret med registerdata fra 381 eksaminationer er svarene ”ja” og ”nej”. Selvom kvindelige bedømmere faktisk er mere orienteret mod den enkelte studerende, og selvom dette generelt er forbundet med at give højere karakter, giver kvinderne ikke signifikant anderledes karakterer end deres mandlige kolleger. Det tyder på, at kvinder aktivt modvirker kønsstereotyper, hvilket er betryggende i den forstand, at studerende ikke bliver behandlet forskelligt alt efter, om de bliver bedømt af en mand eller en kvinde.Are female university teachers more motivated to helping individual students than their male colleagues, and if so, does this mean that students with female teachers achieve higher grades than those taught by men? This article investigates this question using a panel study of examination behavior at two Danish university departments between 2004 and 2010 (381 examinations relating to courses given by 78 university teachers). The analyses show that even though female teachers are more likely to be motivated to support students individually, and this is associated with high grades, in this study there was no difference between the grade distributions given by the female and the male teachers. These apparently inconsistent results might be due to the female teachers actively counteracting the perceived gender stereotypes when marking the papers they set. Alternatively, it may show that professional norms are more important than gender. In either instance it is reassuring in the sense that students are not treated differently, depending on whether the teacher who marks the examination papers is male or female.

This study investigates how an institutional exogenous change interacts with professional norms in relation to behavior in public organizations. We test how a new grading scale introduced in 2007 changed grade point averages and pass rates at two university departments. Data consist of register data on grading between 2004 and 2010. We find that the new grading scale both increased grade point averages and pass rates and halted the negative time trend in these variables. These effects are even greater for exams with an external examiner. The main conclusion is that grading systems affect grading both immediately and over time.