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Local breakthrough? Social media as arena for local election campaign Social media as democratic arenas for opinion sharing and discussions between elected politicians and voters have been described as a vision of the new media. The topic has been a research subject in several years, but there is a lack of research on how social media is used in local election campaigns. The article investigates the use of selected social media, political election blogs, as arenas for campaigns in the Norwegian local elections of 2011. For that purpose we first develop two models of political communication in social media that conceptualise the horizontal and vertical conversation along three dimensions: participants, interaction and the level of nuance. Secondly, we use the models in an empirical study of the use of the election blogs. We base the study on two data sources: a content registration of local blogs and Google Analytics. The analysis demonstrates that the election blogs primarily are used by those who are most politically active in advance and that the majority of participation consists of one-way information dissemination with little exchange of information and opinions. But we also find that the blogs provide an information space more detailed than traditional election rhetoric and that it is myth that the «tone» in online debates always is hard, concise and person fixed. The experiences from the Norwegian local elections indicate that the usage of social media has not yet constituted a vital democratic frontier regarding mass mobilizing, but also that the fear of the logic of marketing is unfounded. The reason is the effect of the institutional conditions and the fact that it is possible «to steer» the conversation online.

Public organizations are increasingly paying attention to strategic communication. However, the extant literature on public sector communication is predominantly descriptive, exploring how strategic communication is performed in practice, with little emphasis on why strategic communication has become so popular. Drawing on organizational institutional theory together with reports from a case study of strategic communication in Danish local governments, we take a first step towards explaining "all this communication". Our results reveal how normative and mimetic institutional pressures occur, as key external stakeholders support and legitimize strategic communication while communicating general, yet detailed, instructions for performing strategic communication in a context of radical organizational changes. Moreover, we demonstrate how local governments translate strategic communication somewhat differently than external stakeholders, causing not only isomorphism but also heterogeneity in organizational strategies. Based on the empirical findings, we argue that strategic communication issues might benefit from being interpreted in a broader socio-political context rather than as a simple management tool for professionalizing public sector communication.

This article investigates the differences and similarities between performance management systems across public services. We offer three propositions as to why the characteristics of performance management systems may still converge across policy areas in the public sector with different levels of task complexity amidst a lack of formal and overarching, government-wide policies. We advance our propositions from a case study comparing the characteristics of performance management systems across social services (eldercare) and technical services (park services) in Denmark. Contrary to expectations for divergence due to differences in task complexity, the characteristics of performance management systems in the two policy areas are observed to converge. On the basis of a case study, we propose that convergence has occurred due to 1) similarities in policy-specific reforms, 2) institutional pressures, and 3) complementarity between political needs and managerial needs. Finally, we discuss how our findings contribute to extant models of how performance management systems develop in the public sector.

Within the last decades, there has been an increased interest in the importance of management and leadership in public sector organizations. With these new emerging management regimes old ideas such as hierarchical management and formal organization would seem to be obsolete. Yet, we see how "old" managerial ideas keep proliferating in the public sector (Grinsven, 2017: Agger and Dahl, 2015: Rosenberg Hansen and Ferlie, 2016). In this paper we engage this puzzle by investigating how and why seemingly "old school" management and leadership models are adopted by contemporary public sector organizations. In particular, we strive to explain why the hierarchical, Weberian-inspired leadership model Leadership Pipeline (Charan, Drotter & Noel, 2001), which was originally developed in the 1970´s and 1980´s, got a fast and widespread diffusion across the Danish municipalities from 2010 until 2017. Utilizing a strong mixed-methods design our findings suggest that the hierarchical leadership model gained acceptance, not only by being translated into a Danish text version and through a strong alliance between public sector managers, academia and management consultants, as shown elsewhere (Nielsen, Wæraas, & Dahl, 2019) but the political context or public sector reforms was crucial in advancing the concept.