New York had Mike Bloomberg and Rudi Giuliani, London had Boris Johnson, Paris had Jacques Chirac. But what makes an effective elected mayor? And what can be done if the office-holder is making a mess of the post?
“A large proportion of whether it works well or badly is nothing to do with the geography, it’s all to do with how the powers of delegated authority are framed – and it’s to do with the behaviours of the mayor and their team and the central government with whom they have to work,” says Peter Hogg, a director in London with Arcadis, an international consultancy specialising in city design.
Hoggs cites Amsterdam and Paris as effective European mayoralties, where office-holders have demonstrated that they can use real executive power to steer the cities towards progress on key issues. With housing an ever-present problem in Dublin, he says the example of Amsterdam is salutary.
“One of the things that successive mayors of Amsterdam and their teams have done really well is to address what had been historically a systemic housing challenge in Amsterdam. If you go from probably the end of the second World War up until the early to mid-1980s, housing had been massively underprovided in Amsterdam and was incredibly expensive. It was a tinderbox issue politically which central government had never managed to solve,” he says.
“A succession of mayors of Amsterdam have had an absolute focus on putting housing and urban regeneration at the heart of the city’s agenda and have actually transcended party politics in making that a rolling city priority that goes beyond any one mayoral term. That to a degree continues today with a huge amount of focus on where you provide new housing in a very physically constrained, and quite historic city.”
The mayoralty in Paris has a “really good” balance of powers and responsibility, he says. “It’s a substantive influential role. They can do things if they get things really right, or they can do things wrong but they have power.”
UCC academic Aodh Quinlivan says some of most effective city mayoralties have been noted for seeking to steer clear of national political divisions. The opposite was the case in the notorious example of Margaret Thatcher abolishing the Greater London Council in the 1980s when the then UK prime minister came into conflict with its leader Ken Livingstone.
“Part of it is that they try to keep – and it’s not always easy – the local government system relatively politics-free in the sense of being more about representing your community to avoid [that] kind of issue.”
If an elected mayor is introduced in Dublin, Quinlivan says there could be merit in a “recall” vote procedure if the office-holder performs badly. “Could there be an opportunity two years into the term of a directly-elected mayor for the citizens, by getting however many signatures, to trigger a vote of confidence in the mayor if they weren’t happy with that person’s performance? Because you could do a lot of damage in five years as well.”
