Abstract
This chapter focuses on European mayors’ notions of ‘participatory’ and ‘representative’ democracy. The authors explore to what extent and why European mayors share the notions of either ‘participatory’ or ‘representative’ democracy. The first result is that mayors support both notions more or less independently from each other and that these two notions are not two poles on one dimension of support for democracy. Second, the aggregated change in support for notions of participatory and representative democracy from 2003–2004 to 2015–2016 is limited. While mayors’ notions of participatory democracy can be explained by their political ideology (left-right), their value orientations, their age, and the size of the municipality in which they serve, support for representative democracy is significantly related to mayors’ value orientations, their gender, and whether or not they are party members. Taking additional macro-variables into account adds only little to the explanatory power of the models: Directly elected mayors show significantly less support for representative democracy than do other mayors. The same holds for mayors from former Soviet countries. However, the more citizens tend to trust political parties, the more their mayors tend to favour representative democracy.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
For an overview about different role definitions of elected representatives as well as their representational styles (with reference to the results of the surveys on elected council members at the municipal and second tier of local government), see Aars et al. (2016).
- 4.
Using individual-level data, the factor analyses in Table 6.2 have shown an almost orthogonal solution indicating two independent concepts of local democracy prevailing. As a consequence, correlations between the two additive indices at the individual level with (a) data from 2003–2004, (b) data from 2015–2016 when only the countries that were part of the first survey are included, and (c) data from 2015–2016 when all countries are included are always small and negative (r = −0.08; r = −0.14; r = −0.15). At the macro-level, however, the correlation between both indices is much stronger (r = −0.44), indicating that in countries where a participatory notion is strongly supported, support for the representative notion is generally low and vice versa. This fact is mainly due to the move from the lower to the higher level of analysis, where much of the individual variance is reduced by the aggregation of data.
- 5.
For the operationalization of materialist and post-materialist value orientations as well as the other independent variables, see the Appendix.
- 6.
In the chapter on ‘Mayors and parties’ in this book, the authors develop and operationalize a ‘party significance index’. For each individual mayor the index captures and measures the perceived importance of local party organizations and the mayor’s individual behaviour in relation to these parties. Inasmuch as the notions of democracy used in this chapter are conceptualized as deeply rooted orientations, we do not include this index in our analyses, since the causal chain—explaining deeply rooted orientations with actual behaviour—is not obvious. The party significance index, moreover, is highly correlated with party membership and might therefore lead to problems of multicollinearity.
- 7.
Not all of the independent variables from the 2015–2016 survey were included in the 2003–2004 survey. This is why some mean comparisons are missing for 2003–2004. This is also why we did not run multivariate regression models for 2003–2004.
- 8.
The very small differences between female and male mayors even change in direction between 2003–2004 and 2015–2016.
- 9.
See values in the first column of tables 6.10 and 6.11 for results from the empty modes.
- 10.
For other typologies of local government systems and their conceptual weaknesses and strengths, see the chapter by Heinelt et al. in this book, which also contains more details regarding the typology constructed by Mouritzen and Svara and the countries to be subsumed under the different types of horizontal power relations.
- 11.
For more information about the countries’ coding, see the Appendix.
- 12.
The cumulated European Social Surveys 1 to 6 contains such a measure for 25 of the countries from our sample (see Appendix). Each country is attributed the mean value of trust from this cumulated data set. The same data set also contains a question asking for individual party identification. The percentage of citizens per country indicating that they have a party identification is used as a second operationalization for the measurement of the ties between citizens and parties.
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Appendix
Appendix
Question wording and measurement of the individual-level independent variables:
Age: ......... years.
Gender: ‘1’ Male, ‘2’ Female. The variable was recoded to 0 ‘male’; 1 ‘female’.
Left-Right: ‘There is often talk about a left-right dimension in [Swedish, English, German…] politics. Where would you place yourself on a left-right dimension?’ Answer possibilities: 0 ‘left’ to 10 ‘right’.
Materialist/post-materialist value orientations: ‘There is a lot of talk these days about what should be the main political aims for the next ten years. Below you will find a list with four goals to which different people would give top priority. Would you please say which one of these you, yourself, consider most important? And which of the four goals would you consider as second most important? (1) Maintain order; (2) Give people more say in the decisions of the government; (3) Maintain a high rate of economic growth; (4) Protect freedom of speech’. Mayors were coded ‘0’ materialist, if they chose 1 and 3 as their two preferences; ‘1’ if they chose 1 or 3 as the first preference, but 2 or 4 as the second preference; ‘2’ if they chose 2 or 4 as the first preference, but 1 or 3 as the second preference; and ‘3’ post-materialist if they chose 2 and 4 as their preferences.
Party member: ‘Are you presently a party member?’ Answer possibilities: 1 ‘yes’, 0 ‘no’.
Size: Natural logarithm of the number of inhabitants per municipality (no data available for the Netherlands).
The macro-variables were measured as shown in the following table.
For measuring the strength of ties between citizens and parties per country from the cumulated European Social Science (ESS) data file round 1 to round 6 we used (a) the mean value per country for trust in political parties and (b) the percentage of citizens indicating that they had a party identification. We added these macro-variables to the urban mayor’s data set. All other macro-variables were included already in the data.
For the coding of the forms of local government systems see Chap. 2 of this volume.
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Vetter, A., Heinelt, H., Rose, L.E. (2018). Mayors’ Notions of Local Democracy. In: Heinelt, H., Magnier, A., Cabria, M., Reynaert, H. (eds) Political Leaders and Changing Local Democracy . Governance and Public Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67410-0_6
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