The paper will assess the relationship between mayors and political parties at the local level. This will include different perspectives. First, it is interesting to see how the mayor assesses her/his political ideology and the political ideology of the parties. This is both concerning mayors with party membership and – even more important – mayors without party membership. Second, mayor-party relationship is also important in connection with the political struggles between mayor and council and the role of the mayor as a partisan actor in local politics. Third, the paperer will also deal with the comparison of different local government system and different patterns of mayor-party interaction which are connected to the government systems.
