The Local Political Elites in East-central Europe: Between the Legacy of the Past and the Decentralization of the Present

The present paper is concerned with the issue of local leadership in the countries of East-Central Europe. Concretely, it constitutes an attempt at examining the outlook, i.e. the profile and the role, of the local political elites in East-Central Europe, with a special emphasis on small-to-medium sized communities. The main argument put forward is that the disparities in the outlook and priorities of the local political elites are to be explained through a combination between the different inheritance of the communist ancien régime, at the level of “elite political culture” (Kowitt 1990) and the present challenges imposed by various degrees of decentralization. For the purpose of exemplifying the inquiry into the local political elites of the region and for further exploring the topic on the two dimensions, the paper employs the comparative approach of “quality-based profile” (Prewitt, 1970) constructed by the members of the Municipal Councils in Tecuci (Romania), Česká Lípa (the Czech Republic), Oleśnica (Poland), and Targovishte (Bulgaria). Hence, the study uses five models of the “ideal portrait” of the local councilor: ethical, pragmatic, technocratic, political, and gender. According to the results of a study applying a standard written questionnaire among the local councilors of the three communities in the period December 2010-February 2013, the paper distinguishes among three corresponding types of local elites: (1) “predominantly elitistic”, (2) “democratic elitist”, and (3) “predominantly democratic”, following two types of explanation accounting for the differences among the four cases: the legacy of the defunct regime and the degree of administrative decentralization.