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While politicians' remuneration is a key issue in the relationship between citizens and politicians, there is still limited knowledge about the politicians' own views on this issue. This article investigates how politicians' attitudes regarding pay are affected by their motivation, political ideology and party position as well as institutional position. Using data from a survey among municipal politicians in Denmark (n = 838), our analyses suggest that politicians with different levels of extrinsic motivation sort into parties with different political ideologies. Left‐wing politicians express a strong distaste for high pay, probably for strategic as well as ideological reasons. In addition, institutional position matters. Chairmen prefer higher rewards for chairmen, but the backbenchers also prefer higher rewards for the chairmen—if they come from the same party. The results help us understand why politicians do not necessarily act in line with the fundamental assumption that individuals prefer more pay to less.

The distribution of political influence changes in times of fiscal austerity. Decision makers generally find themselves with more influence when the economy gets tighter, probably because more tough decisions must be made. In line with expectations based on the asymmetrical distribution of interests between budget guardians and advocates, however, some evidence can be found that the relative political influence shifts in the direction of the guardians when austerity becomes severe. These findings are based on a dataset consisting of a repeated cross‐sectional survey of the perception of political influence among local councillors in Denmark, combined with register data on austerity in the Danish municipalities. By moving the analytical level down to the subnational level, a contribution to the discussion on how austerity affects political influence can be made. Thus, it is not merely a practical saying that crisis opens for new political opportunities; it is now also a research agenda to investigate how this unfolds in different institutional settings.

Abstract
Performance in public organizations is a key concept that requires clarification. Based on a conceptual review of research published in 10 public administration journals, this article proposes six distinctions to describe the systematic differences in performance criteria: From which stakeholder's perspective is performance being assessed? Are the criteria formal or informal? Are the criteria subjective? Which process focus and product focus do they have, if any? What is the unit of analysis? Based on these distinctions, the performance criteria of existing studies used in an empirical review of management and performance are classified. The results illustrate how a systematization of the conceptual space of performance in public organizations can help researchers select what to study and what to leave out with greater accuracy while also bringing greater clarity to public debates about performance.

Improved fiscal management is a frequent justification for promoting boundary consolidations. However, whether or not this is actually the case is rarely placed under rigorous empirical scrutiny. Hence, this article investigates if fiscal outcomes are improved when municipalities are merged. The basic argument is that the conceptualisation of fiscal management in political science is often too narrow as it focuses on the budget and pays hardly any attention to balances in the final accounts and debts – elements of management which are central to policy making. On this background, the causal relationship between municipal mergers and fiscal outcomes is analysed. Measured on the balance between revenues and expenses, liquid assets and debts, municipal mergers improve the fiscal outcomes of the municipalities in a five‐year perspective, although the pre‐reform effects tend to be negative. For liquidity and debt, however, the improvement only entails re‐establishing the levels prior to the reform. The testing ground is the recent mergers of Danish municipalities, which, it is argued, constitute a quasi‐experiment. This forms the basis of a Difference‐in‐Difference design, allowing the alleviation of endogeneity problems and enabling causal inference. The analysis is based on administrative data from the Danish municipalities in the period 2003–11.