Abstract
In this chapter, the authors identify and explain variation in the mayors’ political career by identifying different career patterns. First, they focus on pre-mayoral experience examining seniority in municipal council and other political positions prior to the mayoral mandate. Second, they examine the professionalisation of mayors in office. Third, they analyze mayors’ ambition to remain in local politics or move on towards upper tiers of government. Mayors’ different career paths question the interconnectedness between the tiers of government as well as the emergence of local political actors across these levels. This empirical analysis shows that European mayoral careers are primarily locally oriented in terms of recruitment, occupation and future ambition. Differences within and across countries, however, can be explained by the specific national institutional and municipal socio-demographics configurations.
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Notes
- 1.
See Table 2.17 in the appendix of Chap. 2 in this volume.
- 2.
With an extreme example of one Belgian mayor who declared all possible administrative levels in his political track record; he had already worked as a municipal executive, had been elected at the regional level, as an MP and to the European Parliament as well. This case, even if unique, is quite illustrative when it comes to the level of interconnectedness among different political scenes in Belgium.
- 3.
We note that, despite the constraining legal framework, the percentage of respondents self-reporting a full-time status as mayors is slightly lower than the 100 per cent expected (e.g. Germany and Sweden with respectively with 99.2 and 99.1 per cent). These error percentages are however extremely low.
- 4.
The results exclude extreme and unrealistic values for some respondents stating an average number of hours exceeding the daily hours limit. Following statistical analysis, we excluded values exceeding three standard deviations from the mean (these are more than 115 hours/week, hardly 1 per cent of all respondents).
- 5.
In the case of this survey, specific statistical techniques (such as survival analysis) cannot be performed to deal with so-called right-censored observations (i.e. uncertainty about the time mayors will serve in the future after this survey) because all observations are by nature censored.
- 6.
Out of 2691 mayors, only 1871 (69.5 per cent) answered to the question: ‘For the time being, what are you planning to do at the end of the present mandate?’ The answers were divided into two kinds: ‘I want to continue my political career’ and ‘I want to quit with politics’. One should therefore expect that respondents who state that they would like to continue as mayor would not also respond that they want to quit politics to retire or ‘go back to private profession’, but there were 194 cases of such inconsistent answers in the dataset. Incoherent answers were not included in the analysis.
- 7.
F (2, 1835) = 114.7, p < 0.001.
- 8.
χ2 (6) = 47.01, <0.001.
- 9.
We were considering several operationalisations of the two dimensions, that is, to include professional experience at administrative levels other than the national one, but in such a way we would eliminate the possibility to compare the results from 2015–2016 with those from 2003–2004. The index was adopted from Kjær (2006: 96). ‘The index on interconnectedness with the local political system is calculated as the standardized (divided by the cross-country average) average number of years on the council prior to first term as mayor plus the standardized (divided by the cross-country average) average number of years of seniority in the mayoral office. The index of interconnectedness with the national political system is calculated as the standardized percentage of mayors having served as an MP prior to the first term as mayor plus the standardized percentage of mayors having progressive ambitions’.
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Dodeigne, J., Krukowska, J., Lazauskienė, A. (2018). The Mayors’ Political Career: Between Local and National Ambition. 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_4
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