Every four years there are local elections and hence elections for mayors. Both newly-elected mayors and those who are re-elected must, after the elections, choose how they will perform the mayor's role for the next four years. Will they only perform the role of mayor and will choose a professional mayor's function? Or decide that along with their new role, the role of the mayor, they will continue to at least partially do the work they did so far. In this case they choose a non-professional mayoral function. We believe that this topic is under-studied, so we decided to explore it. The main theme of the master's thesis is the problem of performing the mayor's function and what exactly influences the choice. We chose three factors of influence. These were the size of the municipality, education and non-partisanship. We were focused on the municipalities of the Podravje region. As one of the research methods for the analysis we used questionnaires. We found out that most mayors in Slovenia and in the municipalities of the Podravje region perform the mayoral function professionally. Through the study, we defined three hypotheses. The first hypothesis was confirmed as we found out that in the larger municipalities, the mayors mostly perform their function as professional. The next hypothesis was rejected since mayors with higher education do not perform their functions as non-professional, but in most cases as professional. Examining this question, we came up with interesting conclusions about the construction of political careers. The last hypothesis was also rejected, because we have found out that non-partisan mayors perform their function mostly professional and not non-professional as we predicted. At this point we also got to interesting observations on the repeatability of candidates in local elections.
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