Municipal Councillors in Europe
Objectives
After having finished their work on local state-society relations in Europe by publishing two book most members of the former EURA Working Group on Local State-Society Relation in Europe have formed a new working group. This working group is focussed on the work of municipal councillors based on a Europe-wide survey.
In a way, it is a successor to a working group that conducted a survey of municipal councillors in the late 2000s. This survey only covers councillors from municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants; the one now planned will also include councillors from smaller municipalities – which requires sampling in most countries.
For preparing the survey and in particular the questionnaire a first work shop took place in Dubrovnik on 3 and 4 June 2022 and a second one in Darmstadt on 29 and 30 October 2022. Furthermore, a Zoom meeting with more than 30 participants was held on 3 February 2023 to discuss on a more or less final version of the questionnaire. It is planned to complete the survey by the end of 2023.
This time the following countries are included in the survey (the partners participating from the countries are mentioned in brackets):
- Austria (Carmen Walenta-Bergmann)
- Belgium (Tom Verhelst, Koenraad De Ceuninck and Kristof Steyvers)
- Bosnia and Herzegovina (Marijana Galic)
- Croatia (Dario Cepo, Ivan Kopric, Dubravka Jurlina Alibegovic, Suncana Slijepcevic and Romea Manojlović Toman)
- Czech Republic (Jakub Lysek, Dan Ryšavý and Josef Bernard)
- Finland (Linnéa Henriksson)
- France (Eric Kerrouche and Martial Foucaul)
- Germany (Björn Egner and Hubert Heinelt)
- Greece (Nikos Hlepas)
- Hungary (Gabor Dobos and Marton Bene)
- Iceland (Grétar Þór Eyþórsson and Eva Marín Hlynsdóttir)
- Ireland (Paula Russell)
- Israel (Eran Razin)
- Italy (Annick Magnier, Pippo Russo, Marcello Cabria, Silvia Bolgherini and Marta Ponzo)
- Latvia (Iveta Reinholde and Inese Abolina)
- Lithuania (Jurga Bučaitė-Vilkė and Aiste Lazauskiene)
- Macedonia (Memet Memeti)
- Poland (Pawel Swianiewicz, Katarzyna Szmigiel-Rawska and Adam Gendzwill)
- Portugal (Filipe Teles and Patricia Silva)
- Romania (Cristina Stănuș and Daniel Pop)
- Serbia (Dejan Bursać, Dušan Vučićević and Viktor Stamenković)
- Slovakia (Ján Buček)
- Slovenia (Simona Kukovič)
- Spain (Carmen Navarro and Lluís Medir)
- Sweden (David Feltenius, Anders Lidström, Louise Skoog and Jessika Wide)
- Switzerland (Stefan Kalberer and Daniel Kübler)
- Turkey (Evrim Tan and Irmak Özer)
- UK/England and Wales (David Sweeting, Bettina Petersohn, Colin Copus and Thom Oliver)
The working group met in Olomouc in the Czech Republic on November 22 and 23 2024 to clarify final questions regarding the generation of the common data set resulting from the survey of municipal councillors and to discuss contributions to a two-volume publication to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.
Below some photos taken during the meeting.
Last updated: 04/December/2024