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.

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.

With this book we aim at describing and analysing the selection, daily life, networks and values of local top political leaders in seventeen European countries. The empirical nourishment to the investigation into town halls across Europe is a survey conducted in 2003 with mayors and corresponding top local political leaders. The data covering responses from 2700 leaders is a unique and rich material allowing descriptions and analyses pursuing a number of lines of inquiry.

Local government takes upon itself important tasks and are prime movers in the implementation of new developments in most welfare societies. How it has managed itself is clearly not an unimportant matter, but it is something we know comparatively little about. This volume is concerned with the top civil servants in local government, the Chief Executive Officers, those who form the link between the political and the administrative system. Based on a statistical survey, this is a comparative study which looks at fifteen countries: Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Israel (the only country not to conduct the survey), Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands and USA. Potentially, the CEO holds an important position in local administrative and political life, yet we know little about them, how they are recruited, how they regard their own role and particularly their position vis-a-vis the political system. This is what the contributors set out to explore country by country, and the results are discussed in two overview chapters.