Political Leaders and Changing Local Democracy

The European Mayor

Hubert Heinelt, Annick Magnier, Marcello Cabria, Herwig Reynaert, Hubert Heinelt, Annick Magnier, Marcello Cabria, Herwig Reynaert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319674094
• eBook ISBN: 9783319674100
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book studies political leadership at the local level, based on data from a survey of the mayors of cities of more than 10, 000 inhabitants in 29 European countries carried out between 2014 and 2016. The book compares these results with those of a similar survey conducted ten years ago. From this comparative perspective, the book examines how to become a mayor in Europe today, the attitudes of these politicians towards administrative and territorial reforms, their notions of democracy, their political priorities, whether or not party politicization plays a role at the municipal level, and how mayors interact with other actors in the local political arena. This study addresses students, academics and practitioners concerned at different levels with the functioning and reforms of the municipal level of local government.

© The Author(s) 2018

Hubert Heinelt, Annick Magnier, Marcello Cabria and Herwig Reynaert (eds.)Political Leaders and Changing Local Democracy Governance and Public Managementhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67410-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Hubert Heinelt¹ , Annick Magnier² , Marcello Cabria² and Herwig Reynaert³

(1)

Institute of Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

(2)

Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

(3)

Department of Political Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

Hubert Heinelt (Corresponding author)

Annick Magnier

Marcello Cabria

Herwig Reynaert

Keywords

local political leadership(directly elected) mayorssurveys on local politicians

Hubert Heinelt

is Professor of Public Administration, Public Policy and Urban Research at the Institute for Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt. Between 2010 and 2013, he was the President of the European Urban Research Association (EURA). His research covers various policies (particularly labour market, environment, climate policy) in multilevel systems. Furthermore, he is interested in how the shift from government to governance can be turned into a participatory form meeting standards of democratic self-determination.

Annick Magnier

holds the Jean Monnet Chair ‘The City in European Integration’ at the Department of Political and Social Science, University of Florence. As an urban sociologist, her research activity has been mainly dedicated to comparative analyses of local leadership and their recruitment and values. Her focus in research is currently on local spatial policies and planning systems.

Marcello Cabria

is a PhD candidate in a joint programme between the University of Florence (Department of Social and Political Sciences) and the University of Turin (Department of Cultures, Politics and Society). His research interests are currently focused on local development, local political leadership and spatial planning. He has worked also on economic history, in particular on the issues related to financial markets regulation.

Herwig Reynaert

is a professor at the Department of Political Sciences at Ghent University. He was the founder and still is the president of the Centre for Local Politics. His main interests are in local and regional politics. He is specialized in changes and reforms in local democracy, political participation and citizen satisfaction, election studies, political elite studies, comparative local politics and Belgian politics.

End Abstract

Aims of the Study and Origin of the Survey

Political leadership at the local level has gained more and more interest in the scholarly and political debate during the last 20 years. Political leadership has been seen as necessary to overcome a highlighted democratic deficit by increasing accountability of core policy makers involved not only in policy making in the city hall but also in administrative reforms or in governance arrangements in which different societal actors play a crucial role.¹ These debates about the importance of political leadership at the local level have had, for instance, a clear impact on the introduction of directly elected mayors in a number of European countries.

The book aims to make a contribution to these debates by referring to a survey on mayors of cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants in 29 European countries carried out from the end of 2014 to the end of 2016. These countries were Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England (that means, not the whole UK), Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.² This research constitutes the extended reissue of a previous work, conducted about ten years ago on a more limited number of countries. That survey was based on a questionnaire similar to the current one. This is why the recent survey has been conceived not only in order to trace an updated picture of the present, but also to carry out a comparison with the results of the first survey. Therefore, the following (interrelated) research questions are addressed in the book in a comparative way between countries (or country groups) as well as over time:

• How did they become a mayor, what is their social background and how has their political career evolved?
• What are their role perceptions?
• What is the political agenda of mayors?
• How do mayors interact with other actors in the city hall as well as with societal actors and actors from upper levels of government?
• What is their notion of democracy, are there differences and how to explain them?
• What are their attitudes towards recent administrative and territorial reforms?
• Do party politics (or party politicization at the municipal level) play a role?

The survey was launched by a network of scholars (POLLEADER network) mainly organized in the standing group on Local Government and Politics (LOGOPOL) of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) or in the European Urban Research Association (EURA) and in partnership with the COST project ‘Local Public Sector Reforms- an International Comparison (LocRef)’.

The scholars of the POLLEADER network have carried out a number of surveys during the last 20 years.³ The first survey referred to municipal executive officers (CEOs) or the highest-ranking appointed and non-elected civil servant or employee at the municipal level.⁴ As the research was supported by UDITE (Union des dirigeants territoriaux de l’Europe), it was called the UDITE survey.⁵ The next survey was the aforementioned one which dealt with European mayors from municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants.⁶ It followed a survey on councillors from municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants—called the MAELG (‘Municipal Assemblies in European Local Governance’) survey. It was based on a stratified sample that took into account the regional distribution of the total number of municipal councillors in a country.⁷ The next survey concerned the second tier of local government—or more precisely councillors as well as executive heads (like prefects) and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Local Government Systems: Grasping the Institutional Environment of Mayors
• 3. From the Few Are Still Chosen the Few? Continuity and Change in the Social Background of European Mayors
• 4. The Mayors’ Political Career: Between Local and National Ambition
• 5. Institutional Environments and Mayors’ Role Perceptions
• 6. Mayors’ Notions of Local Democracy
• 7. Leadership Styles of European Mayors: How Much Have They Changed Over the Past 12 Years?
• 8. Mayors’ Agendas: Emerging Variations on the Theme of Entrepreneurialism
• 9. Political Leadership in Issue Networks: How Mayors Rule Their World?
• 10. Vertical Relations After the Financial Crisis
• 11. Mayors and Political Parties
• 12. Mayors in the Town Hall: Patterns of Relations and Conflict Among Municipal Actors
• 13. Mayors and Administrative Reforms
• 14. Mayors and Spatial Planning in Their Cities
• 15. Conclusion
• Back Matter