This paper aims to analyse the relationships between political and economic elites at local level in Southern Europe countries. We focus on France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. We choose these countries, since they present similarities attending to the geographical proximity, interest intermediation system, type of law tradition, type of local government system… However, despite their similarities, they show different results when analysing the interaction between elites in terms of communication and influence.<br/><br/>These countries belong to ‘the strong mayor form’, where, according to Mouritzen and Svara’s typology of local government systems focusing on horizontal power relations, mayors control the city council and are in full charge of all executive functions. Also, taking into account the Hesse and Sharpe’s typology for local-central government relations, these countries belong to the Franco type, where the local government structures the territorial interest intermediation and mayors represent the communities' interests before higher government levels.<br/><br/>We follow the POLLEADER typology, combining political leadership types (horizontal dimension) with different European local government systems (vertical dimension). According to this typology, the selected countries are subsumed under the ‘political mayor’ group. We use the POLLEADER research project database and also data related to mayors from the MAELG (Municipal Assemblies in European Local Governance) project.
