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ABSTRACT
The city region devolution deals have ushered Directly Elected Mayors (DEMs) to the front and centre of the political and governance landscape within English metropolitan regions in the UK. DEMs are invested with high expectations to deliver a range of beneficial urban outcomes. Yet, there is little empirical evidence on the how such Mayoral leadership might act differently to other types of civic leadership to bring about these outcomes. This paper through the deployment of an innovative methodology, a diary analysis, examines how different this leadership model is when compared to its immediate predecessor; the council leader. It finds that the new Mayoral role is less about ‘city management’ and more about ‘city representation’ particularly on the national and international political stage. The paper concludes that this has implications for resourcing this particular leadership model and for the wider research agenda into political and executive leadership of our cities.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. See https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/20/cities-mayors-power-people-george-osborne-devolution.
2. The core cities grouping represent the councils of England’s eight largest city economies outside London along with Glasgow and Cardiff (http://www.corecities.com/).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nicola Headlam
Dr. Nicola Headlam is the Urban Transformations and Foresight Future of Cities Knowledge Exchange research fellow, funded by the ESRC. She is an adaptable urbanist with expertise in city governance, economic development and urban policy and is an experienced researcher. Her core research interests include: the role of public agencies in place, specifically subnational spatial and urban policy and the role of leadership and partnerships.
Paul Hepburn
Dr. Paul Hepburn is a research associate at the Heseltine Institute. Paul is interested in city governance and has core research interests in the potential of the new digital media to enhance local democracy and local governance. He is also interested in methods and tools for analysing and explaining the structure of online political networks. Prior to pursuing an academic career, Paul worked in local government conducting research, developing policy and, latterly, implementing an e-government programme.