Exploring political careers at the local level

Political careers in multi-level systems have recently attracted the interest of scholars who have focused their attention on the impact of regionalization and the emergence of the European institution on the new career opportunities and on the process of professionalization of the sub-national and supranational political class (Borchert and Stolz, 2011; Tronconi, 2018; Verzichelli, 2018). The concept of professionalization has been extended to the regional level in recent decades. Municipal level and most local politicians (for whom politics is not the principal professional activity and the exclusive source of income) remain unexplored. Careers at the local level are usually conceived as a mere stepping stone on the way to regional and national positions. As a result, no in-depth analysis has been devoted to the profiles of local elites and to the imbalance between career paths at the national level and at the subnational level. By relying on an original dataset of more than 20 000 local councilors and executive members from different Italian municipalities of different size and geographical area, this paper aims, first, to investigate the profile of local politicians currently in charge, their socio-biographical attributes and their political background – thus providing one of the very few systematic overviews in this regard. After this descriptive contribution, a second purpose of the paper is to detect the features of “reversed” career paths from the national and regional level to the local level in multilevel systems. The case of the former minister and deputy Roberto Gualtieri, who is now the mayor of the metropolitan city of Rome is in point, does this phenomenon concern only the major - more attractive in terms of career (Stolz, 2003) – cities or do politicians also move from the central (or regional) to the local level? Do those politicians show different characteristics in comparison to those spending their all career at the local level? Are some common features in “reversed” paths detectable? Is the local level a lower-ranked level or simply a different one from the regional and national? Starting from the Italian case, this paper aims at providing some first hints for comparative studies along this research avenue.