Government
Mar del Plata is the head of the department (Partido) of General Pueyrredón. The current Mayor of the city and department is Gustavo Pulti, of the local party Acción Marplatense.
The Honorable Concejo Deliberante (the town council) has some legislative powers. The term of office for both the Mayor and council members is four years.
In 1919, Mar del Plata became the first town in South America to have a Socialist Mayor, a son of Italian Immigrants, Teodoro Bronzini. The Socialist Party would dominate the city political landscape for most of the 20th century.
The Government official page has a comprehensive listing of all Mayors and Commissioners of Mar del Plata from 1881 to the present.
There is an extensive but interesting work by the American sociologist Susan Stokes about the democratic process in Mar del Plata since 1983 in comparison to other regions of Argentina. One of the main thesis of her articles is that the social and economic development of Mar del Plata was quite atypical, with a strong prevalence of middle-class values that discouraged the policy of clientelism that is the common background in other urban environments of Argentina.
Read more about this topic: Mar Del Plata
Famous quotes containing the word government:
“[T]he people seem to have deposited the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new suit of clothes.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)
“It is a maxim of wise government to treat people not as they should be but as they actually are.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)