ABSTRACT
Yet municipal institutions constitute the strength of free nations. Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use it, how to enjoy it. A nation may establish a free government, but without municipal institutions, it cannot have the spirit of liberty. (de Tocqueville, Vol. 1, 1990: 61)
With the end of the Leninist experiment in governing throughout East Central Europe, a new orthodoxy emerged in the scholarly and donor communities regarding the proper structure of government. Indeed, one of the principal lessons drawn from the Soviet model’s failure seems to be that centralisation of both the economy and the government is ineffective, as well as undemocratic. As a consequence, its opposite must be true, or at least that is what the policy literature implies. Though a concern in the donor community with centralised states and economies existed in the 1970s and influenced donor policy in Africa, in particular, the decentralisation paradigm was reinvigorated in the wake of the Soviet implosion (Rondinelli, 1981). Thus, swept up in the third wave of democratisation are recommendations from the World Bank, the European Union, and the Council of Europe for the devolution of power and responsibility away from
the political centre down to regional and especially local levels of government. While much of the world focuses on the most visible aspects of
transition in post-communist Europe, national political democratisation and privatisation, the daily lives of citizens in these states are often more directly tied to less well covered politics at the regional and local levels. This can be true by design or by default. Either the central government has already significantly devolved vast responsibilities to sub-national governments or the central government has fared so poorly in the transition that many public service responsibilities have fallen to local governments in a vacuum. Underlying most discussions of the benefits of decentralisation is the
belief that local governments are closer to citizens, and are therefore likely to be better informed about the needs of their citizens than a distant national government. This theoretical truism is premised on a host of assumptions about local government accountability, capabilities and information, most of which could not be said to hold uniformly true in the transitioning socialist states. Thus, the 2000 World Development Report, dedicated to the topic of decentralisation, concludes enigmatically that when done correctly, over the last 15 years, decentralisation ‘improves the efficiency and responsiveness of the public sector while accommodating potentially explosive political forces’ (World Bank, 2000/2001: 107). A number of World Bank-sponsored studies and working papers support
this theorised link between decentralisation and better provision of public goods (Shah, 1998) as well as lower levels of corruption (Fisman & Gatti, 2000). Others, such as Bruekner (2000), argue persuasively that corruption actually increases when spending power is devolved to local authorities in developing countries, and Treisman (2000) finds a negative relationship between federalism, the number of tiers of government and levels of corruption across the globe. Indeed, Putnam’s (1993) most famous work on regional decentralisation shows quite clearly that decentralisation itself did not produce uniformly positive results for citizens of newly empowered Italian regional governments. My previous research on evolving federal relations in post-communist
Russia during the early 1990s (Dowley, 1998, 2000) uncovered a disturbing pattern associated with the decentralisation process underway there. Evaluation of events data demonstrated clearly that regional governors’ preferences for greater local autonomy were much higher than those expressed by central authorities, but this desire for greater autonomy did not usually represent a demand for more democracy, especially for those being governed. Regional elites were not in the forefront of the democratisation movement, at least not in the majority. Local media outlets were more easily controlled or owned by local governments, and national political parties were weak, leaving politics in the region to nationalists or local strongmen. The World Bank (2001: 106) similarly acknowledges ‘that decentralization
in Central and Eastern
can bolster the power of local elites’ and does not, therefore, always reinforce democratization. Serving with the OSCE as an election observer in Albania during the local
elections in the autumn of 2000, ‘observing’ the decentralisation process in action, I was able to witness both its promise and its illusions from my post in Lushnje, a mid-sized city in the centre of the country. The mayoral campaign resulted in a lopsided victory for the Socialist Party candidate, apparently because the former mayor was too well connected to the principal opposition party, Berisha’s Democratic Party, which governed during the national pyramid scheme scandal. My time spent in ethnically plural Cluj, Romania, after the election of the Romanian nationalist Georghii Funar as mayor reinforced the notion that local elections alone do not guarantee democracy or efficiency (Kersting & Vetter, 2003). When such newly acquired local power is used to antagonise local minority populations and incite nationalist mobilisation, the community does not benefit. The scholarly community bears a responsibility to find out when and how
decentralisation contributes to more effective, transparent, representative government and when it leads to much worse outcomes, such as increased corruption, clientelism, growing regional inequalities or ethnic conflict. This article seeks to explain the sources of variation in one aspect of local
government performance in the wake of externally mandated decentralisation in post-communist Europe. The countries of East Central Europe provide a unique opportunity to test some of the best known explanations of variation in local government performance. For the purposes of this analysis they can be treated as similar systems, in that they all began their decentralisation and democratisation reforms after the events of 1989, they carry with them a similar set of legacies from the single party, command economy period, and they all aspired to the same external goal of European Union membership, with all its related expectations and requirements.1
