PUBLIC SERVICE MOTIVATION AND POLITICS: BEHAVIOURAL CONSEQUENCES AMONG LOCAL COUNCILLORS IN SWITZERLAND

Abstract

This study expands our knowledge about public service motivation in the context of politics as a concept defined by self‐interested and other‐interested motives. Current research shows the importance of other‐interested public interest as a person–environment fit variable. We test the assumption that self‐interested motives differ in regard to behavioural outcomes of local councillors when compared to other‐interested motives. Using a dataset of 8,111 local government councillors in Switzerland, our analysis reveals that self‐ and other‐interested motives have different behavioural outcomes, and that the rational motive of attraction to policy‐making acts solely as a moderator between resistance within council and seeking re‐election. The utility of these findings for the further development of theory on public service motivation and implications for future research are also discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.