On 14 December 1999 Professor Mogens N Pedersen completed his sixtieth year. The day was celebrated by his friends and colleagues by the publication of this Festschrift. The Festschrift contains various articles written by friends and colleagues of Mogens Pedersen where the major theme is elite, parties and democracy. Not only was Mogens Pedersen one of the first political scientists in Denmark, but has also for many years held a prominent position in European political science, as editor of the European Journal of Political Research and as chairman of the ECPR. His notable contributions to the discipline may conveniently be subsumed under the heading "Elites, Parties and Democracy" which is the title of this Festchrift.

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.