The book explores the changing nature of the roles powers, tasks, functions, expectations and challenges of the office of councillor and those that are elected to that office. Based on detailed and long-term research among ...

The chapter aims at highlighting and analyzing attempts to restore or improve the existing institutions of representative democracy – the councils and the councillors – in 15 different European countries, from a comparative ...

Much has been made of the dual polity concept of local government. By comparison less has been made of conceptualising local government’s dual purpose role. The political and service provision roles of local government ...

The paper reports the results of research conducted among councillors in England which explored how they operate in complex governing networks where they interact with a range of public and private bodies. Councillors, as ...

The book explores the claim that English local government exists in one of the most centralised relationships with national government. Such a position fundamentally undermines any notion of local self-government and makes ...

The way local political leaders construct a vision for their localities, develop support and followers and effect action are shaped by factors both within and beyond the control of the leader. The constitutional setting ...

A series of trends have emerged across Europe which have stimulated change in local government, local democracy and local leadership particularly where local government and local leaders have had to respond to crisis, ...

Local Government in England has long experiment with decentralisation and devolution within its own territorial boundaries. Those experiments have partly been driven by political values that favour passing functions and ...

A feature of English local political folk-lore is the belief among national political parties, that Independent councillors are Conservatives in disguise. Yet, little evidence is given to support this idea because little ...

There are just over 20,000 councillors across England, Scotland and Wales and, in 2016, some 85 per cent of them come from one of the three main, UK-wide national political parties: Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat. ...