A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Local Elites of East-Central Europe. A Comparative Approach of Tecuci (Romania) and Ceská Lípa (the Czech Republic)

The present paper is concerned with the issue of local leadership in the countries of East-Central Europe. Concretely, it is an attempt to examine, in a comparative fashion, the profile and the role of the local political elites in two democracies of the region, Romania and the Czech Republic, and the elites’ impact on the evolution of the local communities in the developing region of former Sovietized Europe. For further exploring the issue, the paper proposes, as focal case studies, two small towns in the two countries, quite similar in terms of demographics (roughly 40,000 inhabitants) and developmental strategies (i.e. an economy based on the alimentary industry and on commerce activities, etc.): Tecuci (Galati County, Romania) and Ceská Lípa (Liberec Region, Czech Republic). The proposed inquiry employs mainly the positional method in identifying and analyzing the local political elites, by operationalizing the phrase “local political elites” through the following definition: The local political elite is that group comprising those individuals in legislative and executive positions within the local leading, decision-making structure. Therefore, the empirical part of the present research uses as its samples the members of the Local (Municipal) Councils in Tecuci and Ceská Lípa (the compositions of the two decisional forums in 2011, for some modifications did happen from the composition of the Councils, as they were constituted after the local elections of 2008). For Tecuci, the Local Council includes nineteen persons, while for Ceská Lípa, the Municipal Council is formed of twenty-five members, with various political affiliations, with very different occupations, of different ages, enjoying different degrees of popular support and prestige, but of largely similar social status and with resembling social backgrounds and political trajectories. The main argument put forward by this study is that, similarly to the national level, at the local level, the responsibility of the ruling elite is major in the governance of the community, since the regional and local development in the two countries is dependent on the efficient administration of funds, which is exclusively the prerogative of the political elite. It is this researcher’s conviction that an account on the characterization of these groups at the local level – through the means of analyzing Municipal Councils – can provide an insight into the actual development, the opportunities and the future evolution – generally on short term, the period of a mandate – of the communities they govern. Therefore, the social background and the characteristics of the local elites tell something about their personal and political interests and aims. Since the scope of the research bears a rather descriptive, explanatory nature, the first section of the paper introduces a theoretical basis in understanding the role of the Municipal Councils on local politics and development, by generally presenting the main functions and the workings of these forums in Romania and the Czech Republic, respectively; a separate discussion on the local budget is inserted. The next six sections are dedicated to the two cases selected and follow the inquiries into: (1) the social biography of the members of the two Municipal Councils under scrutiny; (2) patterns of recruitment of these local elites and the importance of the local branches of the main parties; (3) interactions of the members of the Local Councils with other groups and institutions (and the subsequent power networks and formal and informal linkages); (4) values and principles embraced by the local political elites in the two analyzed cases; (5) priorities of the local political elites in the two selected Municipal Councils, and (6) representativeness of the Local (Municipal) Councils in the two towns, in the context in which the Municipal Council is, after all, an instance of legislative representative government (with a special emphasis on passive representation). The structure of the study is largely the result of the observations drawn from an empirical endeavor conducted among the members of the two Councils in the period December 2010-November 2011, in the preparation of the MA thesis.