Studying Mayoral Leadership in Canada and the United States

This chapter argues that building a theory of strong or weak mayoral leadership in the United States and Canada poses many challenges. But there is no reason why a theory of mayoral leadership has to be specific to the national context. Institutional structures may be different in the two countries, attitudes about government may vary, but mayoral leadership in both countries is about establishing a general policy or problem narrative, influencing senior levels of government and crisis management, and usually about proposing projects rather than unilaterally promulgating. For students of mayoral leadership, national affiliation is not the main dividing line, but rather how we think about leadership as a concept, regardless of country. There are marked differences concerning how such terms as “strong mayor,” “power,” and “leadership” should be understood. Determining the relative weight of such variables as personality, political culture, interests, and institutions is also a complicated matter, and there remains considerable confusion over research methods and appropriate questions, not to mention the difficulty of sorting out facts from groundless popular assumptions. The literature on mayoral leadership is much more extensive in the United States than it is in Canada. But the task of building a Canadian literature, almost literally from scratch in many instances, also affords an opportunity: to study mayoral leadership as a pre-emptive exercise—that is, narrowing or defining an agenda, instead of actually wielding formal authority or necessarily creating big projects.