ABSTRACT
This study begins with an examination of the secular institutional transformation of East Germany's local government since the early 1990s following the collapse of the communist regime and during the process of German unification. In its spectacular mix of institutional demolition and reconstruction this transformation bore many traces of what Joseph Schumpeter has called ‘creative destruction’. The article addresses the ‘performance’ of the newly created political and administrative structures of local government a decade after transformation. It argues that the performance of East Germany's institutions and actors has attained the ‘normalcy’ of West German administrative practice remarkably rapidly. Finally, East Germany's institutional development is considered within a comparative perspective, focusing on other Central and East European countries, particularly Poland and Hungary.
