The tradition that can be perceived in contemporary Latvian legislation is in several respects the closest to the Western type of community administration. Philological research has also confirmed that the regulations applied in local government activities in Latvia have been borrowed from the Presbyterian self-government principles of the Lutheran Church. In Riga that tradition goes back to the Hanseatic League. Only the future will show whether or not the “countryside”—which accounts for two thirds of the country’s territory and where Catholics (50% Roman, 50% Greek Catholics) live in scattered localities—can also embrace that tradition. The question can be put in more direct terms by asking if the “countryside” accept the Presbyterian principles of self-government as indigenous Latvian institutions.
In Hungary, relying on the pre-1945 traditions of public administration, it took but a short time to replace the over-centralized communist council system. In addition to the apt observation that local authorities are testing grounds for students of democracy, it is chiefly the pre-1939 administrative traditions that can explain why there are over 3,000 local authorities in a country of just ten million people. Before World War II those municipalities had narrower functions, such as employing a village teacher and operating a village school, where children of different ages studied together. The only other function they discharged was that of fostering the identity of and instilling pride into the local community: an example being that of keeping the cemeteries tidy. A considerable part of Hungary’s local authorities can still do little more than fulfill those functions. It is unlikely that Hungary can ever establish a municipality for each of its more than 3,000 citizens that can discharge each of the following functions: maintain proper schools, provide health care and social services, monitor damage to the environment, issue build-ing permits, act as guardianship authority, etc.
The local government traditions of all three countries go back to pre-modern times when the post-1945 criteria associated with the welfare state was not institutionalized.
Those administrative traditions failed to include expertise in social policy administration that evolved and matured after 1945. And that was not all they lacked. Paternalistic methods of governance may have been adequate to handle certain local crises (on a family level or in a small community) in which rights and duties are unarticulated, yet today can violate fundamental liberties or be discriminatory.
process. Over the past ten years, Latvia and Hungary have achieved a relatively transparent structure of competing political parties. Although the political and electoral cultures of the two countries are not yet as mature as those of the developed democracies, the political profiles of individual parties, and the conduct of politics in general, can be characterized as moving closer to Western standards. The Ukrainian political spectrum, on the other hand, seems to be more oligarchic—instead of competing political programs, different interest groups, lobbies, or clans struggle against one another for political power. This uncertainty of political roles corresponds with Ukraine’s presidential-administrative structure, and is unique among the three countries.
In each of the three countries, constitutional rules and principles are viewed as tools with which to solve pressing political problems. To that end, hundreds of new laws are passed by the respective parliaments each year. In the first years of the transition the relative weakness of the legitimacy and power of central governments in this respect seemed in part to be a reaction to the former party-state system, and had helped to institute “govern-ing parliaments,” that create and amend laws instead of implement“govern-ing governmental regulations and decisions. This practice has had a positive impact in increasing the accep-tance of core democratic principles, and building public trust in the “power of rules.”
When criticizing the efficiency of governance, Western norms of professionalism in the civil service and public administration in performing and implementing public policies are taken as reference points. One must not forget, however, that the main missions of the new state governments in the past ten years have been the creation of national unity and the strengthening of the sovereignty of the new political regimes. Furthermore, the new states have aimed at tackling problems of widening regional and urban-rural economic inequalities, increasing and worsening poverty, and ethnic tensions.
Table 1.2
Ethnic Composition in Hungary, Latvia and Ukraine
Country Number of Ethnic Groups Proportion of
Dominant Ethnicity
Ukraine 4 73%
Latvia 6 52%
Hungary 6 90%
SOURCE: World Factbook, CIA, 1989–1996.
These difficulties can partly explain why it has been necessary to make almost every political decision in the highest political forum, viz. parliament.
6.2 Local Governments
“In the case of countries making the transition from communism to a market economy and addressing issues about decentralization, the appropriate role of local governments and new approaches to governance are central to the reform process. Local governance in this situation requires the acquisition, by both officials and administrators, of new skills and management systems. Moreover, as these countries achieve economic stability, citizens will certainly try to influence governmental institutions to cater to their own increasingly diversified needs, thus placing even more locally focused demands on systems.
Consequently, decentralization—which moves decision-making power closer to commu-nities—is a logical reform choice for systems engaged in transition. For citizens in many other countries, the demand for decentralization is acute, but the struggle to achieve it is complex and far from won” (Global2 1996).
In all three countries, the respective constitutions register the system of local self-governments as the fundamental component of the territorial division of state power.
Moreover, in each of the three countries, special laws establish the political autonomy of local self-governments. The sophisticated language used to express the importance of self-governments creates the impression that the territorial division of power is regarded as a fundamental issue. The treatment of self-governments in legal and constitutional texts can also be considered as an important political gesture to local self-governments.
The OECD report evaluating public management developments in Hungary (OECD 1998) is relevant in the case of Latvia as well: “In 1990, as a result of a substantial decentralization process, a new, up-to-date system of municipal government was put in place; municipal governments exercise power on an autonomous basis and decide on matters of local interest. Their fundamental role is to organize and/or provide local public services.” In Latvia and Hungary, legal regulations on self-governments are quite differentiated and sophisticated, expressing a genuine respect for the power, competence and autonomy of local self-governments, reflected by their empowerment to formulate local regulations.
Legal regulation is uniform: it does not depend on the locality of an application. However, the same regulation has one meaning in the villages and a different one in larger cities. In our experience, decentralization resulted in leaving the local-self-governments to deal with their own problems...
SOURCE: Head of a family care center, Hungary.
In all three countries, the public administration of local municipalities can be charac-terized as having duplicate functions: they are partly subordinate to the elected local councils but, at the same time, they act as the local representatives of central government.
The importance of these two components is reflected in the rules that regulate the relationship between civil servants working in local offices and their employers. The
two systems that differ most in this respect are Hungary and Ukraine. In Hungary, the superior of the notary (the head of the administration) and other civil servants is the mayor. In contrast, in Ukraine the local civil servants are subordinate to the hierarchical order of the centralized public administration bureaucracy. (Latvia is between the two, but closer to Hungary in this respect.)
The power of local municipalities only partly depends on the legal status of self-government. An important question to ask in this case is how well equipped are the localities with appropriate administrative capacities, viz. adequate manpower and resources.
Every case study illustrated a lack of adequate capacities. In the absence of adequate data about these inadequacies, it is impossible to estimate what would be appropriate with respect to local responsibilities in social assistance and service provision. In this respect, the urban-rural divide presents major problems. At least one quarter of those living in rural communities suffer great disadvantages.
Table 1.3
Level of Urbanization in Hungary, Latvia and Ukraine
Country Population Area Urbanization [% of Population Density [millions] [thousands population living [people/sq. km]
of sq. km] in urban areas]
Ukraine 50.0 579.4 71 86.3
Latvia 2.5 62.1 73 40.5
Hungary 10.292.3 65 110.8
SOURCE: World Development Indicators, 1998.
At the same time, some elements of “over-decentralization” can be recognized as well (especially in Hungary and Latvia), concerning the average size of self-governed localities.
Table 1.4
Structure of Sub-national Governance
Country Number of Average Population Number of Average Population Regional Units of Regional Units Local Units of Local Units
[thousands] [thousands]
Ukraine (oblasts) 25 1851.9 619 80.8
Latvia (rayons) 33 76.2562 4.5
Hungary (counties) 20 500.1 3070 3.3
SOURCE: World Bank, Country Reports.
The average sizes of localities would be even smaller if we excluded from considera-tion the relatively huge capital cities, Riga and Budapest. It seems to be something of a
“mission impossible” to ensure a powerful, capable and functional local administration for roughly every 4,000 inhabitants in Hungary and Latvia.
This kind of over-decentralization (without corresponding capacities and capabilities) can be described as the result of a process whereby the main goal of decentralization is the establishment of training grounds for democracy. It was seen to be less important to distribute administrative power in a way that would achieve the most professional, cheapest and transparent system of public service delivery possible.
6.3 Regions, Oblasts, Rayons, Counties—Tiers
One of the most important objectives of the ongoing public administration reforms is to consolidate the status and functions of the intermediate government levels. The composition of the functions of middle-level government seems to be quite ambiguous in spite of all of the political rhetoric about the increasing significance of regionalism.
The clearest situation exists, in principle, in the Ukraine, where the middle-level sub-national units are parts of the hierarchical chain of administrative bureaucracy. But if we look at the different complicated hierarchical routes through oblasts, rayons, cities, auto-nomous territories, urban districts and rural villages, it is not easy to establish a coherent hierarchy in such a large country. On the opposite side of the spectrum is Hungary, where the counties have almost no regional role in co-ordinating the activity of local self-governments. In Hungary, counties are responsible for delivering a well-defined set of public services. In the welfare sector, these functions are typically the management of large insti-tutions like secondary schools, hospitals, or residential care instiinsti-tutions. The Latvian case seems to be the most ambiguous in this respect, partly because of the mismatch of Western-like regional functions and the Soviet-Western-like hierarchical middle range status, and also because of the ongoing consolidation of the previously existing 26 regional units into six regions.
The unclear functions of the regional units are reflected in the lack of a coherent regional policy. One of the guiding principles of regionalism has been the attraction of EU Regional Fund grants—particularly in the case of Hungary and Latvia.
6.4 The Agents of Central Governments, ‘In the Field’
The most difficult question facing the central governments of these states is how each of the governments should relate to each of its many different self-governments. This has been a very sensitive question throughout the democratic transition process. If the government is too active or the regional and local agencies act as prefecture-like commanders
of local self-governments, local autonomy loses its meaning. Fears of this sort of centrally dominated governance are well founded when one considers the tradition of state adminis-tration rooted in the state-socialist era. (In fact, in Ukraine local autonomy is strongly questioned by the extremely powerful government agencies.)
On the other hand, if there are no controlling or supervising units protecting basic rights, citizens can be left vulnerable to the idiosyncratic practices of local governments.
In reality, we saw little evidence demonstrating the existence of this kind of indirect government behavior—and of what we saw, most of it related to fiscal control mechanisms.
The coherent institutional solutions to implement fair targeting, to protect the consumers of local welfare provisions, and to prevent discrimination are almost completely absent in the three countries.