Mayors In Action Five Approaches To Urban Governance

Though mayors directly elected by the residents of a city are so commonplace as to go without comment in the United States and Canada, in many other countries, including England, Germany, and Hungary, they are a recent development, where they have been pitched as an effective, democratically accountable governing option. But is that actually true? Do directly elected mayors deliver better governance than the alternatives? This text presents the results of an in-depth study of that question and the role of the elected mayor in general, drawing on data from a large number of cities from around the world to show the wide range of policy approaches and outcomes that the position can entail.

Directly elected mayors are political leaders who are selected directly by citizens and head multi-functional local government authorities. This book examines the contexts, features and debates around this model of leadership, and how in practice political leadership is exercised through it. The book draws on examples from Europe, the US, and Australasia to examine the impacts, practices, and debates of mayoral leadership in different cities and countries. Themes that recur throughout include the formal and informal powers that mayors exercise, their relationships with other actors in governance - both inside municipalities and in broader governance networks - and the advantages and disadvantages of the mayoral model. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are used to build a picture of views of and on directly elected mayors in different contexts from across the globe. This book will be a valuable resource for those studying or researching public policy, public management, urban studies, politics, law, and planning.

Though mayors directly elected by the residents of a city are so commonplace as to go without comment in the United States and Canada, in many other countries, including England, Germany, and Hungary, they are a recent development, where they have been pitched as an effective, democratically accountable governing option. But is that actually true? Do directly elected mayors deliver better governance than the alternatives? This book presents the results of an in-depth study of that question and the role of the elected mayor in general, drawing on data from a large number of cities from around the world to show the wide range of policy approaches and outcomes that the position can entail.

Holistic in approach, this Handbook’s international range of leading scholars present complementary perspectives, both theoretical and empirically pertinent, to explore recent developments in the field of local and regional governance.