Introduction: Studying Local Elites and Democratic Development

Abstract

In what ways are local governing elites important for the success or failure of effective and sustainable democratic development? In order to answer this question, we study the interaction between local elite change and general democratic development in seven European countries throughout the 1990s. Although we know a great deal about the importance of institutional conditions of democracy, manifest in mutual interaction among a separation of powers, a rule-governed state apparatus and long-term experience with political pluralism and growth of social capital (Tocqueville 1835, Dahl 1961, Dahl 1971:226, North 1990, Putnam 1993, Hadenius 2001, Rothstein 2002), we still know little about the political capital accumulated at the local government level (Bourdieu 1991:172, Mouzelis 1995, Szücs 1998a, Hadenius 2001:264). With the term political capital, we refer to the governing elites’ ability to mobilize resources that are directly or indirectly related to stable democratic development in differentiated, complex societies (see also Mouzelis 1995:201). Thus, our inquiry is about the specific local governing qualities that interact with national democratic progress and stability. Our longitudinal and comparative approach of analysis across cities in both advanced democracies like the Netherlands and Sweden, as well as five new democracies of the former Soviet Union, allows us to study universal characteristics of local elite change. Above all, it permits us to search for the components of a local political capital that are favorable for successful national democratic development, as well as to reveal the path for developing such political capital at the local government level.