Local Elections and Political Leadership

Abstract

Spanish local government grassroots are composed of 8.132 municipalities, which constitute fragmented, atomized, and diverse electoral spaces. The local government regulations establish an executive body, the mayor, characterized by great political and functional power ad intra and ad extra as regards the municipality. The mayor can therefore be depicted as a strong mayor with presidential overtones, thus providing an excellent base on which to project political leadership. Mayors emerge from the councilors of each municipality, who in turn are elected in competitive electoral processes, in which, on analyzing the electoral results in aggregate terms, factors such as nationalization, regionalization, and localism of the local party system appear, together with an incipient interdependence of factors, given the multilevel nature of governance in Spain. It is in this scenario that Spanish local leadership is inserted, which can be nuanced according to the importance of the municipalities and the personality of the mayor, allowing the mayor to be a true manager of interdependencies in a governance environment.