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Local Government Reform as State Building: What the Polish Case Says About “Decentralization”

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Abstract

Poland has become one of the more decentralized states in Europe. Local governments now control a third of all public expenditures. They have also delivered the goods modernizing the country’s infrastructure and restructuring its schools. This success cannot be attributed to widespread civic engagement because decentralization in Poland was clearly a “revolution from above.” Nor can it be attributed to the implementation of rules typically thought to enhance accountability in decentralized polities because Polish local governments do not finance themselves, and many of their responsibilities remain poorly defined. Instead, Poland’s success is due to an array of institutions designed to train, professionalize, discipline, and empower newly elected local elites. These institutions suggest that creating effective local governments may lie less in “getting the rules right” or in empowering citizens to participate in their own governance, than in institutions that encourage local governments to monitor themselves while embedding them in the regulatory structure of the state.

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Notes

  1. Water supply, sewage-treatment, storm drainage, solid-waste disposal, spatial planning, public lighting, and the maintenance and improvement of local roads, bridges, waterways, parks, museums, and libraries.

  2. Self-governing regions have substantial responsibilities for planning and allocating EU funds. This creates some financial dependency of lower level governments on them, but it is indirect and limited.

  3. Yields in most developing countries are worse (Sepulveda and Martinez-Vazquez 2011). In only a few places—most notably the USA and Canada—does the tax generate more than 2.5 % of GDP. Nonetheless, the fiscal federalist literature insists that the property tax is the single-best local tax. See Bird (2010).

  4. Jews constituted 30 % of the pre-war urban population and owned at least an equivalent share of urban real-estate. The 2.5 million Germans expelled from Silesia were the dominant urban population.

  5. Without this contribution, pre-tertiary education expenditure would equal 3.4 % of GDP—low for the OECD—as opposed to c. 4 %—the average (pp. 46, 218)

  6. The share of students below level 2 proficiency decreased by 8 %; the performance of the lowest-achieving students increased 40 points and the scores of the highest achieving pupils remained stable. These trends continued in 2012.

  7. Similarly, Regulski complained: “Unfortunately, in Poland people don’t know what self-governing cities and communes are, they don’t understand their essence, or appreciate their significance” (1992, p 105).

  8. This community congealed around a series of research projects led by Regulski and Kulesza and run by the Department of Regional Economy of Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Lodz’s Department of Economics and Urban Development, and the Law School of Warsaw University. Much of the work was done with Danish and Norwegian researchers.

  9. Swianiewicz (2011) writes: “It has never been formulated as official policy but both analysis of implemented national policies and surveys of local politicians suggest that in practice Polish local governments have a purely functional role.”

  10. The Peasant Party argued that a national association would ignore rural interests while former communists claimed that a compulsory association smacked of the old regime.

  11. Initially, four associations were established: the Union of Polish Municipalities (1990), Association of Polish Towns (1990), Association of Metropolitan Cities (1990), and Union of Rural Gmina (1993). With the Second Phase of Decentralization, these were joined by the Association of Powiats and the Association of Self-Governing Regions.

  12. Twelve from the national government and two each from the six local government associations.

  13. Borodo writes: “It appears that RIOs cannot be counted as part of the state administration, nor as a unit of the self-governing sector, and thus from a systemic point of view must be seen as a separate category of bodies, possessing the status of a state body but equipped with far reaching independence in the execution of its tasks and functions” (2013, p. 234).

  14. In the 2000s, their governance structure was centralized to prevent inconsistent rulings across jurisdictions and to extend a new electronic accounting system to all subnational governments. Centralization seems to have rigidified some practices (Walczak 2013).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Michael Bernard, John Connelly, Grzegorz Dziarski, Patrick Heller, Jan Herczynski, Michael Kennedy, Richard Locke, Josh Paciewicz, Atul Pokheral, Tomas Potkanski, Edward Steinfeld, Tony Watson, and the anonymous reviewers at Studies in Comparative International Development for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Levitas, A. Local Government Reform as State Building: What the Polish Case Says About “Decentralization”. St Comp Int Dev 52, 23–44 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9203-5

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