Direct election of the mayor, introduced in Italy in 1993 as a result of anti-party attitudes and 'modernization', is one aspect of the broad redefinition of local authorities which recently culminated in an ambiguous revision of the constitutional text aimed to promote vertical subsidiarity. The impact of such a profound revision of the mayor's role is under debate. Beyond the radical changes in party labels and systems, a stronger territorial differentiation in the pattern of recruitment, a slight positive discrimination in favour of marginal categories in re-election - possible forerunners of a deeper transformation - and the dominant social profile of current mayors (gender, age, education, work experiences, party training), it is not very different from that of their colleagues of 30 years ago. Their new role marks, nevertheless, significant progress towards greater accountability, activism and ambition among mayors, which is related to their increasing detachment from party politics and to an increased weakness of the other participants in local democracy. But such an excessive individualization of power and visibility in Italian local authorities threatens to reduce the possible positive impact of the reform on the efficiency of policy-making and legitimization of local politics. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
The internationalization of economics and politics has forced local governments to develop new context-appropriate strategies; these strategies, characterized by a greater degree of interaction with non-governmental key actors and with the business world in particular, have been termed local or urban governance. This article is intended to illustrate the impact of three factors - local leadership, local political arenas and intergovernmental relationships - on the formation of cooperative networks between local governments and business organizations as one of the basic types of urban governance model. To achieve this, a comparative multi-level analysis presenting the CEO's perpective on such issues was conducted. The results show how local and intergovernmental opportunity costs and leadership are the factors that largely determine the degree of collaboration between local government and business. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2008 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.