The Mayors’ Political Career: Between Local and National Ambition

In this chapter, the authors identify and explain variation in the mayors’ political career by identifying different career patterns. First, they focus on pre-mayoral experience examining seniority in municipal council and other political positions prior to the mayoral mandate. Second, they examine the professionalisation of mayors in office. Third, they analyze mayors’ ambition to remain in local politics or move on towards upper tiers of government. Mayors’ different career paths question the interconnectedness between the tiers of government as well as the emergence of local political actors across these levels. This empirical analysis shows that European mayoral careers are primarily locally oriented in terms of recruitment, occupation and future ambition. Differences within and across countries, however, can be explained by the specific national institutional and municipal socio-demographics configurations.