Mayoral Local Leadership – How Do Mayors Deal with Conflicting (Leadership) Roles?

Mayors fulfill a variety of formal roles within local governments (Astrauskas & Čelkė, 2024). In the Netherlands, for example, these roles range from maintaining public order and promoting administrative integrity to safeguarding democratic procedures. A relatively new responsibility is addressing subversive crime, which involves collaboration with law enforcement and using this information to take administrative action against such activities. These formal roles may conflict with the mayor’s more informal duty to foster cohesion within the local community and to preserve and develop local identity. This tension becomes particularly evident during crises or disasters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Wayen-berg et al., 2022). As the "father or mother of the community," the mayor increasingly serves as a unifying, comforting, and ceremonial figure, embodying the municipal administration’s public face (Barber 2013). The mayor's role in combating undermining crime makes them more vulnerable as “father or mother” of the community. The mayor's involvement in tackling undermining crime makes them more susceptible to threats, which undermines the mayor's ability to stand alongside residents as mayor in society. In our paper, we discuss how the tension between the formal roles of mayors and their role as “father or mother of the community” manifests itself in practice and what this means for the way mayors must fulfil their local leadership role. We also examine what this may mean for the extent to which it is necessary for mayors to have a form of democratic legitimacy. Our paper will be based on a combination of legal-dogmatic research and empirical research. With our paper, we want to invite other scholars to discuss cases from their countries in which the tensions described are visible and how mayors deal with them. We also want to discuss with them what they think this should mean for the degree to which mayors should be democratically legitimised. We will use the outcome of this discussion to further enrich our paper and add a comparative legal compo-nent.