Making sense of Executive-Opposition relations in local governance contexts through the perceptions of local elected representatives

Local democratic governance is a mixture of rivalry and cooperation between majority and minority political forces. With the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, local governments had to rethink its action mode and carry out a swift digital transition of their modus operandi. This digital transition affected both the administrative and political dimensions of local government, in particular the nature of Executive-Opposition relations. Although local democracy was not suspended, the context of exceptionality raised a series of institutional challenges. Using new survey data on the perceptions of local elected representatives (directly elected and ex-officio members of Municipal Assemblies) about the performance of their local democracy, we will seek to characterize Executive-Opposition relations in the Portuguese local government context. We will then run a probit regression model to assess three theory-driven factors influencing the nature of such institutional relationship in normal and exceptional contexts: the way minority rights are protected in practice in normal governance contexts; and the extent to which democratic performance and communication have been negatively affected by the pandemic context. The results show that Executive-Opposition relations are tendentiously conflictual. Our findings also show that the Executive’s capacity to explain to its constituents the scope and impact of the exceptional measures adopted to cope with the pandemic crisis and its formal duty to communicate these decisions to the Municipal Assembly may hinder Executive-Opposition cooperative relations.