Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview I. Working Group on Local Government Author(s) Marta Lackowska University of Warsaw Warsaw Poland Swianiewicz Pawel, Title Vertical and horizontal power relations of European mayors – does the size of a municipality matter? File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract As once Baldersheim and Stahlberg stated (1999), in the realm of globalisation and competitive pressure on local authorities, they tend to look more and more beyond the local horizons in order to serve local community well. Reaching for external resources may be realised in two conceptually different ways: (1) creating vertical relation with actors located on higher levels of traditional political organisation and/or (2) creating relations with peer-partners, for instance with adjacent municipalities. First mode relates strongly to the concept of rescaling – municipality reaching up to the county-, region-, state-, or even international-level undertakes the upscaling strategy of using external resources to meet its goals. Second mode brings us to the issues of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) and internal power relations (between a mayor and a council or administration). Both vertical (rescaling) and horizontal (IMC, internal power relations) relations pose important aspects in the contemporary public administration, with a vast body of academic literature dealing with these issues. In the paper we endeavour to present variation in vertical and horizontal strategies of European mayors. Especially, we want to check if the size of a municipality matters for undertaking a special kind of a rescaling, IMC or internal relations strategy. We assume that the smallest and biggest municipalities reveal very different patterns of such interactions. To the best of our knowledge, the aspect of size in rescaling and IMC studies has not been extensively developed so far. In our empirical study, we lean on the survey conducted among mayors of 29 European countries within the international project Polleader. For our research we have chosen 7 countries, in which the survey encompassed not only big cities, but also smaller municipalities (below 10 ths. hab.; i.e.: Croatia, Germany, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland).
