Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview I. Working Group on Local Government Author(s) Joanna Krukowska University of Warsaw Warsaw Poland Lazauskienė Aistė, Jérémy Dodeigne Title How to become a Mayor? Mayors´ Careers, Behaviour and Seniority File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Joanna Krukowska Abstract How to become a mayor? European mayors' political careers The study of elected politicians’ careers and behaviour has always drawn the attention of political scientists (Pitkin 1967; Norris 1997). Political careers are however rarely studied for their own sake but for what careers tell about legislators’ motivations, legislative institutions and the sociopolitical system (Dahl 1961, Hibbing 1999). The identification and description of mayors’ career must take into account the general trend observed in most European countries and parallely all over the world: the professionalization of localpolitics and, consequently, the increasing professionalization of elected officials. The paper aims to describe the diversity of mayor’s political career and to explain this variation across and within countries. It tries to answer the questions of (i) seniority of local political leaders, (ii) their political ambitions (progressive, static or discrete, Schlesinger 1966), (iii) scale and direction of flow among political levels (local – regional – national – supranational, Kjaer 2006), and – last but not least – (iv) differenciation of mayoral professional background. It also addresses the question of resources on which mayors build their political position (e.g. partisanship, personal charisma). The data comes from a broad international survey of local political leaders conducted in the framework of the POLLEADER project between 2014 and 2016 in 17 European countries. The results of the research are contrasted with the data collected 12 years ago for the first edition of the POLLEADER project.
