Local Political Leadership in Spain

Abstract

While different European programmes to modernise local government have clearly shown that local political leadership needs to be reinforced, the procedures designed to work towards attaining such a goal are less clear. Addressing this general problem, this article focuses on how this is to be achieved in Spain. It examines the political leadership of mayors in the ‘Big Cities’ as well as the suitability of the mechanisms envisioned to strengthen this leadership within the framework of the programme of modernising Spanish local government.

Acknowledgement

This study is part of the larger research project ‘El Estudio Comparado del Proceso de Descentralización en España, Francia y Quebec: La Gestión Pública Multi-nivel’, coordinated by Prof. Dra. Raquel Ojeda and funded by the Fundación Centro de Estudios Andaluces (CENTRA). A previous version of this work was presented to the Study Group on Local Governance and Democracy, coordinated by the Profs. Drs. Marcel Boogers, Tomas Bergström, José M. Ruano and Linze Schaap within the framework of the EGPA Conference held in Milan on 6 September 2006. The author would like to thank them all for their feedback and encouragement.

Notes

1 The Law 57/2003 of 16 December – the so called Ley de Medidas de Modernización del Gobierno Local (Law of Measures to Modernise Local Government – LMMGL) – uses the expression ‘Big Cities’ to denominate large population municipalities with more than 250,000 inhabitants (whether they are provincial capitals or not) and provincial capitals with more than 175,000 inhabitants. This was the case of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla, Zaragoza, Málaga, Murcia, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Palma de Mallorca, Bilbao, Valladolid, Córdoba, Alicante, Vigo, Gijón, La Coruña, Granada, Vitoria, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Oviedo, Pamplona, Santander, San Sebastián and Almería. This set of Big Cities represents 30 per cent of the Spanish population.

2 If the candidate does not receive a majority of the votes cast by the elected councillors, he/she may be elected as mayor by a relative majority.

3 Thus, the evaluation of the national political panorama and the national political leaders affect the orientation of the local vote more than the perception of the particular local controversies and the efficacy of local politicians.

4 Andalusia, Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country are the exceptions of this electoral rule.

5 Within the Spanish parliamentary system of local government, the Assembly is composed of the mayor and the councillors. The latter elect and control the former, and the former heads the latter. The executive council is formed by the mayor and the councillors s/he appoints to be charged with political portfolios and by delegation, with powers controlled by the mayor.

6 Graham (1993), Bartolini (1996) and others have underlined that political parties are the result of the interactions between rival groups competing for influence and resources. In this way, internal party politics involve varying degrees of cooperation and competition. As Sartori (1980) and Panebianco (1990) among others have indicated, the practice of nomination is usually employed by the party leaders as a ‘reward’ as part of the maintenance of informal relationships of loyalty, exchange and reciprocity with members of their political networks of support, as well as an ‘incentive’ in the establishment of informal relationships of cooptation and clientelism with members of factions or group that may contest the leader's authority. Ultimately, the kind of network the leader promotes by the distribution of selective incentives constitutes one of the main dimensions of leadership style in local political institutions (Natera, 1997).