2/ 🗳️ Tal Elovits & Nimrod Barnea study how Israeli parties decide whether to run in local elections. Key factors? Municipal size, previous electoral success, mayoral candidacy & coalition membership. They find that many national parties run in local elections without revealing their party label.

3/ ⬅️➡️ In my own article I examine whether the left-right cleavage matters to local politics. By analysing Flemish local party manifestos I find strong ideological resemblance between local branches of a single party and between local branches and their national party, regardless of municipal size.

4/ 👴🧒 Joes de Natris digs into the salience of social services in Dutch local manifestos. National party priorities & local social conditions shape emphasis, but local party resources don’t.

5/ 🗺️ Petr Voda & Petra Vodová study sub-municipal representation in Czech merged municipalities. Parties mention neighbourhoods more when local candidates from these neighbourhoods run, but small and peripheral areas often lose out.

6/ 🏛️ Vibeke Woien Hansen, Hilmar Mjelde, Jo Saglie & Signe Bock Segaard examine the relationship between local party branches and local councillors in Norway. Their findings demonstrate that work in local branches and the council is strongly integrated, however, there is substantial party variation.

7/ 💶 Martin Gross, Dominic Nyhuis, Sebastian Block & Jan Velimsky investigate issue attention in German municipal councils. Based on an analysis of parliamentary questions they demonstrate that issue salience is affected by financial and institutional constraints.

8/ 🤝 Thijs Vos, Simon Otjes, Lianne van Kalken & Geerten Boogaard study council votes in Dutch municipalities with a councilwide agreement. They show that the latter can soften the coalition/opposition divide - if parties choose cooperation.

9/ 💶 Adam Gendźwiłł, Paweł Swianiewicz & Dawid Sześciło find partisan bias in Polish grant allocation at the local level. Affiliation with the governing party at the national level increased funding. The partisan bias even affects municipalities ruled by independents.