Municipal Councillors in Europe: diversity of the perceptions, roles, and political responsibilities I

Abstract

The session aims to discuss the political, institutional, and representative profiles of local political actors, more specifically municipal councillors, from a comparative perspective. Councillors are an important part of local representative democracy connecting citizens to political decision-making through different channels of political representation models. Municipal councillors are ‘the instruments through which the residents of a particular geographical area have expressed their preferences for one set of candidates, policies, service standards, and tax levels’ (Wilson, Game, 2006). Local politicians also perform a variety of different functions such as resource allocation, negotiations between the competing interests’ groups, communication and inter-institutional networking, defending what is called the public interest. These interactions can take on a variety of forms, relieving the diversity of local government systems in Europe within their administrative, civic, and political cultures, local interest negotiation strategies, and political agendas. The session asks a range of research questions, including the following: What is the notion of democracy and citizen participation among the councillors involved in local state-society relations? What are the roles and functions perceptions of municipal councillors? How effective are local politicians in implementing different policies at the municipal level? To what extent do local politicians engage with and involve community members in the decision-making process? How does the political affiliation and partisanship of local politicians affect policy-making at the municipal level? How well do local politicians represent the diversity of their constituencies in terms of gender, age, professional experience and socio-economic background? What factors influence public trust and credibility in local politicians? How do local politicians build networks and coalitions within and across municipalities? The session is based on the results of a comparative European survey on local councillors, conducted in several European countries in 2023-2024. The survey aims to analyse the recruitment patterns, career paths, political party affiliations, role perceptions and behavioural models, attitudes towards local democracy, political representation and participation of local councillors in different European countries, taking into account different self-governance systems. In addition to examining gender issues and how they affect councillors' perspectives, the session will also look at how councillors differ from each other in different institutional settings, assess how institutional and contextual factors affect councillors' attitudes, and explore councillors' perspectives on roles in governance networks and measure their influence on the local agenda. The session also invites similar empirical cases from European countries and beyond to consider the diversity of councillors' roles at local and national political levels. The empirical and theoretical papers may represent different theoretical approaches and disciplines such as political science, public administration, public management, sociology, human geography.

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