European Mayor II

The projects’ goal is to provide a complex picture of local leadership in the environment of the Czech Republic through participation in an international survey, original local research of mayors of municipalities of all sizes, and a secondary analysis. Despite various issues related to local government in the Czech Republic having been studied more or less extensively throughout the last 20 years, a complex examination of the dynamics of local leadership and the role of mayors within the international context is missing. In most previous studies, mayors serve as informants, rather than the independent objects of study. When they have been, it is either an elaboration of electoral data or studies of very limited scope. In order to create a complex study, we believe in an innovative combination of questioning techniques (survey) and contextual data analysis (socioeconomic, demographic, institutional, etc.), which can reveal the nature of the conditionality of the opinions, decision making and agency of these key actors in local community life.