In France, the Socialist party want to reform the practice known as cumul des mandats, where an MP or Senator also holds elected office at local level in his home town. The argument is that wearing two hats in that way distracts national level politicians from their main jobs, and promotes cronyism and pork-barrel spending in their local areas.
An article in Le Monde has some eye-opening statistics. 80% of French parliamentarians are also councillors, compared with 20% in Britain, Germany and Italy. Of the 185 socialist deputies in the French National Assembly, 80 hold executive office on a local or regional council, and a similar proportion of socialist senators do the same. Of those who don’t hold executive office, most are backbench councillors in their local areas. The figures for the UMP (Sarkozy’s party) are pretty similar.
Who knows, if the socialists get their way, how many French parliamentarians will give up life in Paris and retreat to their communes. Perhaps not very many – but could you imagine any MP or peer in the UK preferring local office to national? It’s a symbol of the centralism of the UK, even set against the France of the préfet and the Code Napoléon, that being a footsoldier at national level is so clearly preferable to leading the ranks in your home town.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
Anthony,
I had a post on here a while ago – really, it just quoted Simon Jenkins in The Guardian: https://localdemocracy.org.uk/2009/06/03/reductio-ad-absurdum/
In the UK, a big part of our problem is ‘The Daily Mail Problem’ – that our populist political leaders are not really interested in promoting the idea of elected politicians at all. Neither Brown or Cameron are arguing for more elected representatives or more profile for them. As Jenkins said, our problem is that we’re ‘democracy-lite’.