Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 15th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview IV. Working Group on Democratic Governance of Multiethnic... Author(s) Agnes Horvath University of Tokaj Sarospatak Hungary Marianna Dobó Title The importance of education at the work of minority local governance File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Establishing the minority local governance in Hungary was an important milestone of the democratic regime change of 1989. Following the minority law of 1993 the first elections of local minority governments in Hungary were in 1994. In the more than one decade that has past since then several areas of the minority corporations’ work have been disapproved, many times questioning even the foundation of their working. I wish to study the functioning of the minority local governments by their aspects of decision making in my presentation. Around 150 minority local governments in Northern-Hungary were studied with questionnaires during a study done in 2005. The starting-point of the research was the approaches to find out what kind of decision making process do the minority local governments, which are considered the capital area of enforcing minority interests, have. Major fields of question: A) How do the different ethnic minority local governments rule, what are the steps and who take part in it? Within this examining the existence of thematic decision proposals and if so then how does it happen: who determines the decision process’ problems? Are there conflicts inside the ethnic local governments and does this show up between the local governments and the majority society? B) How is the communication of the ethnic minority governments’ decisions accomplished? Is it possible to find in it standards typical of the ethnic groups? Closely related to this are the characteristics of the minority elite and their connections with other official groups like Lungo Drom, MCF etc. C) An important part of the study is the one presenting the limits or the traps of the minority ruling that can block the efficient decision making, the co-operation within the minority and among the minority and the majority. I wish to present during the analysis the social milieu, too, in which the minority local governments operate. With the help of earlier researches I wish to reveal in the present sample too (including not only gipsy minority local governments) the scores of the power dominance make felt by local government units. This phenomenon is one of the possible obstacles to even chances among organizations. The facilities of a change, which make even chances available, are: • Trainings: short, professional trainings about local governmental methods, its requirements and facilities • Creating and enhancing motivation: both in human resource and financial fields • Using mediators and facilitators when detecting difficulties of decision making • Efficiently applying various techniques (negotiation technique, reasoning technique, conflict management, team and group building etc.) In the course of the research we measured the knowledge of these techniques and the willingness to use them too.
