Kløgtigt Købmandskab eller kølig kommunalpolitik - Danske Ældreråd

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English Abstract
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In the decentralized political system the Danish citizens are still getting their possibilities for
influence strengthened by law. The focus is turned to the output and the results of the public
service producing units with the introduction of the New Public Management paradigm. The
citizen is the customer and the aim of the public sector is to deliver the goods. But the delivery
requires knowledge of what the citizens wants. That makes citizen involvement central for the
local authorities.
Hirschmans (1980) paradigm with ‘exit’ and ‘voice’, frames how the citizens are involved in the
decentralised local policy processes. But the ‘voice’-institutions is a challenge for the universal
Danish welfare state. This is due to the fact that the critical citizens are telling what they want
without showing connected cost-benefit calculations and willingness to pay and the welfare state
is still financed by collective taxes. The starting point of this thesis lies in this dilemma.
One of the voice-institutions is the ‘senior citizen council’. It is a citizen-centred council which
needs to be heard by the local municipality before a decisive decision. Their aim is to advice the
local politicians in all policy areas that affect citizens above 60 years of age. But also to enhance
the citizen responsibility and ensure communication between the elderly and the politicians.
But the question is how much influence these ‘citizen council’ actually has. There are arguments
both for and against a great amount of influence which makes is a scientifically question. The
aim of this thesis is to identify how much influence the ‘senior citizen council’ actually have –
and why. This is the first exposure in a Danish context about the citizen influence through legally
voice-institutions. Until now analysis has only been focusing on the users-involvement (E.g. the
board of governors of a school where the parents are represented). It is done by a qualitative
comparative empirically study of councils. Both town mayors, managers of administrations and
the members of the ‘senior citizen councils’ have been interviewed.
The understanding of power has both been changing policy and implementation, and the forms
of power are both directly, anticipated and structural. With the use of Knights (1992) version of
rational new-institutionalism, the influence has been clarified. Thereby the focus is on both
formal as well as informal structures. The conviction is that institutions have a significant role in
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