Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 20th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Local Government Author(s) Daniel Klimovsky Comenius University Bratislava Slovakia Title Local autonomy in the V4 countries: Myth or reality? File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Daniel Klimovsky Abstract Turning specifically to democratic theory, the theoretical antinomy in regard to position of local political level has at least two sources. On the one hand, the pluralist view of liberal democracy often idealizes local politics as a seedbed of democracy. At least since De Tocqueville, local politics have held a privileged space for educating citizens in democratic norms, organizing them in the pursuit of their interests through electoral politics, and more generally checking the centralizing, authoritarian tendencies of the central state apparatus. Even Schumpeter recognized that only local politics could allow for greater levels of citizen participation beyond voting for candidates (Oxhorn 2004: 17). On the other hand, communitarian alternative places community interests above those of the individual voters so important to the liberal or pluralist view. The communitarian theories of democracy are also based on what is essentially local politics. The work of Rousseau stands out here, including its tendencies to at least implicitly endorse a tyranny of the majority that marginalizes (or worse) minorities and makes active citizen participation redundant by stressing the objective nature of the “common interest” (Oxhorn 2004: 18). The ubiquity of local political issues provides the most obvious testimony to its importance in the processes of governing the state. With few exceptions, all countries have a system of local government (or designated agencies such as local public utilities) through which those functions of government that need to be locally delivered can be structured (Paddison 2004: 19). It is associated with a fact that local governments are created to render services in defined geographical areas, primarily because of the inability of central governments to attend to all the detailed aspects of government (Reddy 1999: 10). V4 countries, like the other CEE countries, have gone through a few very important changes for a relatively short period (since 1989). Basically, they have been associated with three fields. The first of them has had political character, the second one has been linked to economy, and the third of them has been related to organization of state and its bodies. If we look at them from local governments' perspective, all these changes have influenced positions of the local governments, or in other words, extent of local autonomy. This paper is dedicated to the comparison of local autonomy (position of local governments within the political and administrative system) in the conditions of V4 countries (i.e. Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) with special reference to recent twenty-years-development. I would like to show both the similarities and the differences between these countries in terms of extent of the mentioned autonomy. For this, I utilize both the description of historical, political, legal and economic conditions and some relevant empirical data.
