Sources of Contemporary Authority for Mayors: Pinning Down Modern Political Authority in Relation to Executives’ Role Orientation

Abstract

Political leaders around the world face a general scepticism towards authority. In order to cope with this challenge, new political repertoires and forms of authority are called for. Yet, the sources of contemporary political authority remain underexplored. In this paper the comparative relevance of fourteen authority sources for mayors is studied. It presents the results of a mixed-method study that includes a representative survey of Dutch mayors as well as in-depth interviews and focus groups to relate mayors’ perceptions of available sources of authority to their role orientations. The results show that principle-based and capacity-based authority sources are particularly important for Dutch mayors and challenge the widely shared assumption that the selection procedure is an important source of authority for political leaders. At the same time, other aspects of the mayor’s statutory position, such as his institutional independence and formal responsibilities, have not lost their relevance. Further, our results indicate that the role orientations of mayors to some extent affect the authority sources that they rely upon.