ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to describe and analyse the institutional settings of the cities studied in the PLUS project, with a focus on the restrictions and opportunities for action for political leadership, and restrictions, opportunities and incentives for community involvement. An important set of restrictions of course will be the interdependencies between the local authorities on the one hand, and higher levels of government and local community actors on the other. Therefore the issue of local autonomy and local self-government will be examined in the first part of the chapter. The second part of the chapter will discuss the institutional arrangements with regard to the political executive. Finally, potential consequences of other structural differences will be discussed. The empirical data for the description is primarily provided by the academic partners of the project mentioned in Chapter 1. In principle the focus will be on cities rather than national systems. Cities, however, are parts of national local government systems, at the same time influencing and being influenced by national systems. Parts of the analysis therefore will be carried out with the national systems as units of analysis.1 Nevertheless, the objective of the chapter is to say something about the particular institutional settings of the eighteen cities, and not to provide generalisations about national local government systems.
