The aim of this article is to assess the implications of different concepts of local democracy for political leadership. We take democracy as the idea to promote a common good under circumstances where there is no strong pre-existing agreement on what this common good is, what it entails and how it can be promoted – with the significant qualification that this promotion is not imposed on society by force or manipulation, but is subject to public justification (Barber, 1984). Democracy is thus intimately linked with the question of what is ‘good’ for the members of a political community, and considering local democracy implies that local government, like governments at upper levels, has a process of collective self-determination as its normative core.