Explaining the Outlook of Local Political Leadership in East-Central Europe: Between the Legacy of the Past and the Decentralization of the Present

The present paper is an attempt to critically and comparatively examine the transformations triggered by both the level of decentralization and the “legacy” of the ancien régime on the general outlook of the local political elites in the countries of former Sovietized Europe. Concretely, the largely empirical inquiry advances a series of hypotheses regarding the (a) local elites’ socio-demographical profile, (b) the elites’ patterns of recruitment, (c) the values embraced by the local political leadership, (d) the interactions and contacts with other groups, and (e) the priorities of the local elite, to be verified by the means of two independent variables: (1) the level of decentralization specific to each country under scrutiny in East-Central Europe, and (2) the “legacy” of the ancien régime, i.e. the nature and specificities of each communist dictatorship in the region. For the purpose of exemplifying the validity of the proposed hypotheses and of the two tentative explanatory trajectories, the study employs the case-studies of small-to-medium-sized towns (30,000 – 40,000 inhabitants) in six countries of East-Central Europe: Romania (Tecuci), the Czech Republic (Česká Lípa), Poland (Oleśnica), Hungary (Gyula), the Slovak Republic (Levice), and Bulgaria (Targovishte). Debuting initially as an exploratory endeavor, this study develops on the impact of two major exogenous dynamics on what is coined here as elite’s “outlook”, namely the socio-demographical profile, the patterns of recruitment, the interactions and contacts with other groups and institutions, the values embraced by the elites, the priorities and the policy agenda, the passive representativeness. It dwells on the difficulties of conceptualizing and operationalizing the notions of “decentralization” and “legacy” of the former regime, favoring the threefold dichotomy of “communist dictatorships” in ECE, developed by Kitschelt et al. (1999), for the second independent variable, and a fiscal understanding of decentralization, for the first independent variable (pondered by establishing three thresholds for the indexes of fiscal decentralization provided by the relevant literature and the World Bank/ IMF). Subsequently, this paper proposes a threefold taxonomy of local political elites in East-Central Europe, following the variations in six dependent variables, explained by two independent ones: (1) a “predominantly elitistic” local political elite (Romania, Bulgaria), (2) a “democratic elitist” local political elite (the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic), and (3) a “predominantly democratic” local political elite (Poland and Hungary). Each of the three “ideal” models bears its own peculiarities and tentatively encompasses the main characteristic features of local leadership in each of the six countries under scrutiny. The proposed typology is also instrumental in explaining different dynamics in public administration and local politics and local governance during the two decades of transition of democracy and democratic consolidation, for it aims at establishing patterns of political behavior and political action at the local level.