7 Local community transformation
The Czech Republic 1990–20001
Local community and local government
The first moments after the November 1989 regime change caught local communities in the Czech Republic unprepared. Moreover the further from Prague — the centre of the civic mobilisation and the subsequent political changes — the more uncertain the situation became. Other major cities such as Brno and Plzeň quickly assumed a similar role as epicentres of change, but in most localities people had difficulty comprehending what was happening, and the first few months of 1990 were critical in determining future developments: the danger was that apathy, mistrust and indolence would prevail. Civic Forum played a vital role at this time by opening information channels between the cities and rural or peripheral parts of the country. Students were the principal actors, tirelessly attending public meetings organised by local activists and authorised by the local authorities (still then known as national committees). These citizens' meetings became fora for expressions of courage, for the acquisition of trust and for the activisation of values which had long been disengaged.
The initial political changes at the local level concerned the creation of legislative and institutional foundations for the renewal of municipal self-government and for the democratic functioning of local public adminis-trative organs. The resuscitation of representative bodies and of their autonomy in decision-making about public affairs was the first step in the transformation of public administration within the context of each municipality. In part this involved the decentralisation of competences from central institutions to municipal councils and administrations: the first major step towards territorial reform was taken in May 1990, when regional national committees, the key component of the old centralised system of public administration, were abolished.2 The second phase of the democratisation of local government culminated in November 1990, when municipal elections installed the first generation of democratically elected councillors as a new local political elite.
The period from the fall of the communist regime to the first municipal elections had a number of special characteristics which were often decisive for the future development of particular communities. An institution peculiar to this period was the round table, as a place for negotiations between oppositional (revolutionary?) forces and the pre-existing establishment, usually represented by the national committee and the communist organisation. Round tables typically led to personnel changes in managerial posts and the replacement of the nomenclature by new political elites, a process which was regulated by a law on the reconstruction of national committees which set a deadline of the end of March 1990 for its completion (parliament was also reconstructed in the same way). The reconstructed national committees then continued to administer local affairs until the November elections. Where it was successfully realised — where sufficient numbers of motivated and uncompromised people were forthcoming (regardless of whether they had experience of local government or not) — subsequent developments received a significant boost (Heřmanová et al. 1992). It was important that this period was used to prepare new organisational arrangements which could be implemented immediately after the elections.
Changes in the civic culture of small municipalities
Applying the concepts of social heritage (Elias and Scotson 1987) and social network (Buštíková 1999) to an analysis of the memoirs of representatives of the first generation of municipal councillors and mayors, it is possible to gain an insight into how this critical period was experienced and interpreted by its principal actors. This section examines the memoirs of two mayors,3 belonging to two different generations, who entered local politics in 1990 with different types of social heritage. Mayor A was a man aged 50 in 1990, elected in November in a village with 520 inhabitants. Mayor B was a man of 30 in 1990, elected in a municipality with 4,000 inhabitants. The size of municipality is fundamental to their narratives:4 in a small municipality private matters coincide with public ones; the mayor is construed as a politician and executor of political decisions and his (her) story becomes the story of the municipality itself, and vice versa, the story of the municipality is the story of the mayor and frequently also his (her) family.
Mayor A was born into a strict Catholic farming family in 1945. Hard work, discipline, obedience, parental authority and God were the main values associated with his upbringing. At the beginning of the 1950s he started school, and a discrepancy between home and school education was inescapable. His father had resisted land collectivisation, but only at considerable cost to the family — even harder work, poverty and persecution. Inner conflict in addition to conflict with his father's attitudes made him strive to escape his family's social heritage, to change his inherited identity, to reach some harmony with the world around. In 1958 when his father entered the united farmers' cooperative in the village, he could begin to build a personal career via secondary school, technical university, and finally an academic post in a research institute. But his peasant origin prevented him from fully realising a professional career: he was not asked to join the Communist Party, and thus could not take up any senior position in the institute. Having failed to find a position adequate to his qualifications in the social network defined by his profession, and having lost the status in the local community social network derived from his family's former prestige, he retreated to the privacy of his own family. A stranger in the village community, a citizen of second rank, he succumbed to resignation in his professional career, the privatisation of his personal life, and a condition of limbo, as if awaiting resurrection and recognition. There were some opportunities to ‘cheat’ fate, notably the spring of 1968 and the advent of the ‘Gorbachev era’ in 1984, but every attempt only confirmed his position of second-rank citizen and his situation in the institute was not altered even in November 1989.
His own account of how he entered politics opens with a description of a public meeting:
It was the beginning of December 1989 and the meeting place was completely full.
Everyone anticipated with baited breath what the five students from Brno University were going to say. Perhaps they expected that they would make the revolution. Many were merely curious.
For many people the revolutionary mood was just something interesting and new in their lives, and they were certainly not prepared to make any sacrifices. Maybe it was fear spread by the former leaders and their allies.
You could sense this immediately when the students invited people to speak. There was silence. I couldn't wait any longer. I raised my hand and felt the anticipation and tension channelled towards me from all sides. I was standing face to face with my fellow citizens, who, in such a small municipality, can always watch everyone else from an intimate distance.
Everyone stared at me, at least that's how it seemed, since the total silence deepened the tension. No raised fists, no strong gestures. Only words, a simple address:
‘Dear fellow citizens, dear citizens of A, all of you, who came here today of your own free will.’
Almost immediately I felt that most of the people trusted me. You cannot help feeling touched by that trust and by the historical importance of the moment. As if thoughts hidden for years suddenly broke through the artificially built dam and started to float invisibly and uncontrollably through the air.
Is this the truth or just a moment of relief? I am no different from the others, I was also suspicious.
‘The students came here to explain the meaning of their actions, to awaken us’, I carry on in a voice that is barely coming through my taut throat.
What made him speak out and break the anxious silence? The challenge of striding out from the ‘normalisation mud’, and the unpredictable risks associated with this moment explain why nobody started to speak. How did it happen that he spoke up? And how was it that people trusted him? The obvious explanation is that he had not in fact abandoned or been stripped of his social heritage. He had ignored it only in a vain attempt to obtain a new identity, which would allow him to accomplish a professional career. At the crucial moment, however, when he decided to intervene in the public meeting, he in effect acknowledged the existence of this social heritage (his family origins, their status in the municipality), and reclaimed it not as a burden, a limitation, or a bad sign, but on the contrary as something which could evoke a warm trust among his fellow citizens in the hall. The social heritage that he had tried to shake off, which once made him a stranger and a private man in the local community, a citizen of second rank in a society under a totalitarian communist regime, now began to mutate into social capital, in step with the political transformation of society towards plurality and democracy. In this moment he was to win back his inherited identity among his ‘respected fellow citizens …’ who no longer looked on him as a stranger and citizen of second rank.
He immediately became the spokesperson for Civic Forum in the village. He was elected mayor in 1990, and once more in 1994. From his memoirs it seems that he did not join or form any partial social networks based upon strong ties; instead he remained rather weakly tied into the extensive social network of the community as a whole. He established formal channels of communication (radio, a local newsletter) between the public of the municipality and himself as mayor. He developed new connections oriented outwards from the municipality and embedded himself as a social actor into these new social networks.
Mayor B describes himself as an engineer with university education and fluency in several foreign languages. He started his professional career in 1984 in a region where the main industry was mining. It seems that he was not greatly constrained by the communist regime as he developed a good career in landscape recultivation. The father of two children, he was also a member of local social organisations such as the beekeepers' union and the Czech Union of Nature Conservationists — respectable organisations and respectable leisure time activities. However the regime regarded environmental protection activities as subversive ones, while beekeepers have a reputation in literature as the motherland's awakeners, an unfortunate reputation to have under a modern authoritarian regime.
Mayor B's account of his entry into local politics runs as follows:
I took part in the activities of Civic Forum in a municipality which has always been one of the exemplary ones in the district.
Our municipality was the principal beneficiary of the accumulation of resouces from mining within the district. This is how large concrete housing estates were built for miners at the beginning of the 1980s, intruding into a previously peaceful community. The construction of housing estates was followed by further resources to build a medical centre, a new grammar school and a new nursery school, a sewage treatment plant, new roads, a shopping centre, a funeral parlour and other attainments of the time. People moved in to the new flats if they had the right contacts to the right people. Many new family houses were built at the time as well — naturally only for those who had the right contacts or the right position within the system.
All of a sudden, the velvet revolution came.
But what do they want, these people from Civic Forum?! Everyone has nice clothes, good shoes, there is bread and milk in the shops every day and there is even a public water main in the municipality and new roads everywhere.
Most councillors voted against co-opting new members from Civic Forum, allegedly because they had no previous experience and now they would like to ‘make decisions’. In the spring of 1990 members of the Municipal National Committee (MNV) actually protested in front of the District National Committee (ONV) building with a poster saying: ‘Citizens of B are against co-opting new members to the District National Committee.’
The chairman of the MNV resigned, citing health problems, and three months later his deputy resigned in a similar way. The MNV secretary stayed on as head of the administration until the election.
The election was drawing nearer. Former MNV deputies divided themselves into four groups and formed four lists of candidates, and all of sudden there were no communists any more — instead they called themselves Social Democrats, the Movement for Moravia and Silesia, and so on. Civic Forum shared one list of candidates with the Christian Democrats. Some were very surprised that those who ‘had no previous experience’ gained most votes and eight of the fifteen council seats.
In such a polarised and difficult situation nobody wanted to run for mayor. Nobody.
The electoral procedure, approved at the first meeting of the municipal council, was based on simple voting — every councillor was to write the name of the proposed mayor on a piece of paper.
Thus I became the youngest mayor in the district and one of the youngest in the republic. In two months I was to celebrate my thirtieth birthday.
Mayor B holds an honourable place in the social network of the local community due to his family's social heritage, and especially the standing of his father, the chronicler of the municipality, who probably ranked among the traditional local elite.
He was an activist in Civic Forum from the beginning, and received the second largest number of votes in the first local elections. His fellow citizens clearly ratified his honourable position within the community, but the previous establishment — the outgoing members of the national committee — did not want to resign local power. In the local council environment he found himself isolated, unable to draw on his own social networks. He therefore oriented his new relations outwards, not only across the municipality border, but also, thanks to his knowledge of foreign languages, by setting up projects on an international level, based on cooperation with municipalities abroad. After the first electoral term he returned to his profession, enriched by newly acquired personal contacts.
Development of local public discourses during the first free election campaigns
June 1990 saw parliamentary elections take place in Czechoslovakia. Turnout was massive and the majority of citizens rejected the communists. Both the elections and the preceding electoral campaign were historic events not only for subsequent developments on a national scale, but equally for the transformation of local society. During the previous five months at least thirteen new political parties and movements were formed, in addition to the three quasi-political parties which survived from the pre-1989 era (the Communist Party, the People's Party and the Socialist Party). Around ten of these made some inroads (or held their own) in the political life of smaller towns and rural municipalities, but the existence and standing of Civic Forum in a given community was paramount. At this level the trustworthiness of those who affiliated to Civic Forum had a determining influence on the trust which the movement enjoyed and on what it actually represented. In small communities, more than anywhere, the election campaign turned into a contest between Civic Forum and the Communist Party, or alternatively the communists versus ‘the rest’.
For illustration we can cite two contemporary accounts of the election campaign in small Czech municipalities.5
Example 1
On 30 April 1990 the Communist Party put up posters in a municipality of 1,000 inhabitants. By the next morning they had been spray-painted over or touched up with the message ‘Liars’. The rest of the campaign was also marked by anti-communism. Slogans and verses attacking the Communist Party appeared: one ditty about ‘rotten cherries’ led to a fight in the pub (the cherry was the communists' election symbol); rumours circulated that party members were going round the old people in the village threatening them; Civic Forum pointed to rumours circulated by the communists. The election campaign was personal and prejudiced. People had lost their fear and made use of the chance to speak out, but often only expressed negative emotions directed at particular people who represented the old regime in one respect or another. During the campaign controversial decisions by local administrative organs in the past were brought to light. These had often been the result of direct commands or unqualified judgments by central organs, including, for example, permission obtained for the construction of a lodge in a protected area, which was issued directly by the Ministry of Agriculture. Personal and family grievances from the era of collectivisation, and from the normalisation era, were aired, and such conflicts led to some strange political alliances.
Example 2
The election campaign in this municipality of 3,000 inhabitants took place against a background of the unravelling of a conflict set in motion by the reconstruction of the national committee and pitting Civic Forum against the Communist and Socialist Parties. But it was a conflict of particular people, not parties or ideologies. The crystallisation of ‘political opinions’ began with a fight (involving a police officer) during which one person suffered injuries serious enough to cause his absence from work for a fortnight, and continued with hysterical outbursts at pre-election rallies and on the pages of the local press. The happy ending at the electoral urns was soured by the filing of a complaint by the district electoral commission against one of the participants in the ‘crystallisation of political opinions’ for electoral sabotage, and several people collected their voting cards and went to vote in another ward.
It is difficult to judge how much the electoral campaign affected the decisions of voters one way or another, but it certainly served another purpose — as a hitherto unimaginable opportunity to express attitudes and opinions. It called forth emotional rhetoric and poorly articulated opinion. It created a situation where people were forced to reveal more about themselves than could be read from cadre questionnaires. It was an opportunity for the gradual realisation that another value system existed, in which previous behaviour, actions, statements or reticences took on new significances of guilt or vindication. It was a huge opportunity for communication.
Local elites and their political culture
At the first local elections in November 1990 Civic Forum won the most council seats nationwide (32 per cent), followed by independent candidates and groupings (28 per cent). The Communist Party won 14 per cent of council seats, the People's Party 12 per cent and the Social Democrats 2 per cent. The turnout was 74 per cent. These figures represent a thorough turnover of local political elites: 80 per cent of councillors elected in 1990 had no previous experience of public administration. The size of the municipality was directly correlated with the extent of the turnover: the larger the community, the greater the discontinuity between pre- and postNovember elites. The 1990 intake of councillors was characterised by an over-representation of people with a technical or scientific education, half of them were university educated, 21 per cent women and their average age was 42. In general they were people who had kept a distance from the previous regime, refrained from joining any of the permitted political parties and had joined the civic protest movement at the moment of social explosion. Their triumph at the local level indicated significant political support for the new regime. Although their opinions and attitudes were often closer to the political orientations of the new power centre than to those of the citizens who elected them, they represented a link between the centre and the peripheries which shored up the unity of a shaken society (Baldersheim et al. 1996).
Turnout in 1994 was 62 per cent, but in 1998 it was only 45 per cent. The other major intervening development has been a decrease in the share of seats won by political parties, and taking into account the number of independents who stood on party lists as well, just 23 per cent of councillors were members of political parties after the 1998 elections, compared with 63 per cent between 1994 and 1998. Other recent findings corroborate the conclusion that Czech local politics is founded on a concept of
Key to parties:
KSČM Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
KDU-ČSL Christian Democratic Union-Czech People's Party
ČSSD Czech Social Democratic Party
ODS Civic Democratic Party
ODA Civic Democratic Alliance
US Freedom Union.
community rather than on political party organisation (Vajdová 1996, 1997). A related characteristic is the formation of coalitions at local level which respect neither left–right oppositions within the political spectrum nor the guidelines of central party apparatuses, but instead match the interpersonal networks of a local social system (Buštíková 1999). The rejection of party organisation by local political elites can be interpreted as a willingness to compromise, but it also problematises the essence of a political system based on competition between parties aspiring to power, governance and decision-making. Given that the size of a community has been shown to be a significant factor in forming the attitudes of citizens and local political elites (Dahl and Tufte 1973) it is not surprising that the attitudes of local elites towards parties varies with municipality size: even in the Czech Republic, large towns (with a population above 50,000) are a different case, where political parties are considered a standard component of the local political system, without which democratic self-government would be hindered.
Pragmatism in small town politics
The idea that self-government is a non-political affair rests on the assumption that there are no divided interests in a community. The task of non-political self-government is either to do the best for all citizens or to carry out the orders of central government: in both cases there is nothing to decide or agree on, and no one whom it is necessary to convince. Yet even in localities politics is a process involving issues of who gets what, when and how, and political decision-making revolves around these intrinsically political questions, which invoke opinions and require legitimisation. ‘There is no such thing as the technical administrative resolution of political problems…. And since politics is more about opinions than truth and right, political processes ought to be as open as possible to the influence of citizens' (Offerdal 1995: 203). However the attitudes of local elites in small Czech towns during the 1990s can still be described as pragmatic, according to a longitudinal empirical research project.6 Local politicians understand their role as one of solving practical problems in which there is no room for politics. During the first electoral term the priorities of local councils were things like security, sewerage, waste water treatment, environmental improvements, water supply and waste disposal, in other words basic conditions for the existence and smooth running of the community. Not until 1997 does survey data suggest that other problems such as local transport, housing for low-income groups and leisure-time services had gained precedence.7 The implication is that by then, at least in larger municipalities (by Czech standards), basic infrastructural needs had been met. However this had not brought about a change in the pragmatic approach of local politicians, who continued to view local politics as a technical-professional activity in which expertise should have the decisive say.
Influence and decision-making
According to the mayors of towns and villages above 2,000 inhabitants interviewed in 1997, the greatest say in decision-making about communal affairs belongs to those actors with a legally defined role in local public administration: the council, the board and the mayor. Since 1992 their opinions on the role of the council have not changed, but mayors are increasingly apt to view their own decision-making role as more significant than that of the board. The influence ascribed to non-local public administrative organs — district offices and central government — has decreased in time, while the administrative components of local government (the office and the chief administrative officer) are ranked behind the elected organs in terms of influence. Although local political systems comprise other subjects such as political parties, associations and interest organisations, churches, businessmen and local enterprises, their influence was seen as small, and the same applies to so-called ‘old structures’. Only in the case of churches were significant regional variations in these appraisals found, reflecting the stronger influence of religion in Moravian than Bohemian society. The attitudes of local elites towards the influence of the ordinary citizen reflected a certain optimism about the role of citizens in 1992: around 40 per cent attributed citizens a large degree of influence, a further 40 per cent ‘medium’ influence, and 20 per cent little influence. But by 1997 this enthusiasm among mayors for civic participation had faded: 20 per cent ascribed citizens a major influence and 40 per cent little influence.
Cooperation as an element of the political culture of local elites8
Cooperability implies the ability of local self-governments to incorporate a principle of cooperation with other subjects into procedures of governance (Vajdová 1998). The concept invokes the personal characteristics of people in local government but is again most strongly dependent on the size of the community and the corresponding level of complexity of public administrative functions. Relations between local self-government organs themselves and with other institutions can be characterised in terms of their frequency, urgency, longevity and content, about which our survey findings provide only limited testimony. They tell us only how much importance is attributed to cooperation with various subjects by mayors. Nevertheless, since mayors are the actors whose decision-making influence is generally considered greatest within a community (together with the council and the board) their evaluations of the importance of different cooperative relationships can, with allowances, be taken as a rough operationalisation of actual cooperation at the local level.9
If we rank actors according to the importance attributed to them by mayors, first place goes to employees of the local authority, who are in turn ranked according to their position in the organisational hierarchy: the chief administrative officer first, followed by heads of departments and then other officials. That cooperation with these actors is regarded as important requires no explanation, since they staff the administrative organ which is directly charged with providing services to citizens. The next most important relationship, according to mayors, is with citizens themselves. Lower down we find the mayors of other municipalities, which indicates that the necessity of cooperation with neighbouring councils is felt, even though a third of respondents did not consider the absence of regional self-government bodies at that time as a problem.10 Least importance was attributed to establishing cooperative relationships with trade unions, representatives of political parties other than the respondent's own and other local politicians. Private business interests in the locality, one's own political party and representatives of non-political and non-economic organisations including NGOs were placed roughly in the middle of the scale, which in the case of the latter seems to indicate an expression of openness towards the community and responsibility towards the participation of citizens in public affairs.
Cooperability, as indicated by the attitudes of mayors, increases with age, but decreases with education; it is more strongly associated with mayors from a ‘blue-collar’ background than those from a ‘white-collar’ background, and is correlated with non-membership of political parties but with membership of other organisations, whether recreational or professional. No correlation was found between overall cooperability and whether or not a municipality had developed cooperative relationships with foreign partners, but membership in regional, national or international municipal associations was associated with greater cooperability. At present the Ministry for Local Development recognises 372 municipal associations in the Czech Republic (including micro-regions), and it is evident that this form of cooperation has become an important way of addressing problems which stem from the small size of most Czech municipalities. Cooperability was found to be lowest among representatives of medium-sized towns (20,000–100,000).
Civil society restoration: the reshaping of civic culture in town life
The social changes in the post-socialist Czech Republic can be interpreted as a process of increasing social differentiation and a complementary process of increasing mutual interdependence in a more complex type of society. ‘Being interdependent with so many people will very probably often compel individual people to act in a way they would not act except under compulsion. In this case one is inclined to personify or reify interdependence’ (Elias 1978: 93–4). While major social changes are taking place this condition will be more frequent; one understands the world around even less than usual, feels stressed by incomprehensible, uncontrollable forces, and this generates feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness and apathy. The feelings of powerlessness, dependence and of an uneven position are further accentuated by the interdependence of so many people. Perceptions of binding social networks as blind social forces exacerbate feelings of powerlessness in people's own lives. The period after November 1989 was such a period in Czech society. The transformation processes in the political, economic and social spheres started at the same time but have been proceeding at different speeds (Musil 1992). Against the background of these changes it ought to be possible to observe changes in an individual's feelings as he or she is exposed to powers they do not understand but which act with the force of powers of nature.
Research on the political culture of local communities allows us to hypothesise that general value orientations are characterised by an attitude towards oneself and power which can be labelled ‘outsider syndrome’ according to the concept of ‘the established and the outsiders’ put forward by Norbert Elias (1987). Furthermore ‘outsider syndrome’ was found to be the most significant factor for political attitudes and political participation by citizens in a locality. Its importance for political participation and for distinguishing patterns of political culture has been demonstrated empirically (Vajdová and Kostelecký 1997).11
To help explain the development of patterns of political culture and political participation in localities it would be important to know if ‘outsider syndrome’ is strengthening or diminishing. Empirical data in fact suggests that the very strong sense of powerlessness identified in local community studies shortly after the velvet revolution has diminished in the 1990s.
The citizen in the local community
Local communities in three Czech towns with 9,000–14,000 inhabitants — Blatná, Český Krumlov and Velké Meziříčí — were the subjects of repeated sociological surveys during the 1990s.12 They show that during the period 1992–8 individuals’ feelings of powerlessness, which we assume to have a crucial role in forming attitudes and influencing behaviour, have been diminishing (see Table 7.2).
These figures indicate both that citizens found it very difficult to orient themselves in the new, post-revolutionary regime in the 1990s, and that rapid changes in politics and economics threw individuals into situations in which they felt exposed to stresses whose origin they did not understand and whose magnitude they could not anticipate. However, it appears that this extreme situation has passed and the new conditions are becoming more acceptable, more understandable and easier to cope with; people's powerlessness is in decline.
The same trend is visible on the indicator of social capital, which measures mutual trust, openness and the strength of people's integration into the social networks of local communities. Two questions were posed:
‘Do you have someone to go to in difficult situations?’ and ‘Do people ever ask you for help?’ The existence of social capital in inter-personal relationships creates conditions in which people have someone to go to in times of difficulty and conversely places them in a position to help others. The demand for mutual assistance has apparently not changed over time and is roughly the same in all three towns: one-quarter of people are never approached for help, 26–32 per cent are rarely approached and only 5–6 per cent are approached very often. However the other measure of mutual assistance — whether people have someone to go to — showed significant improvement between 1992 and 1998 even if the rate of change differed in the three cities: the improvement was greatest in Blatná and least in Český Krumlov. Unfortunately the way the questions were asked makes it impossible to identify the precise nature and frequency of the contacts which people have at their disposal or actually make use of. The responses are merely indicative of the openness of social networks and the kind of interaction between people and their environment, and any connection between attitudes of powerlessness and attitudes which express the involvement of people in local social networks must also be deduced with caution. However, there was an unmistakeably frequent correlation between powerlessness and situations in which respondents are unable to turn to anybody for help, suggesting that declining feelings of power-lessness may be produced by the growing density of networks of contacts which can be used in critical situations, and conversely may open the door to mutual openness and trust between people. The question needs to be asked whether the growth of connections is not just a manifestation of a rather negative kind of cronyism, but further analysis of other aspects of powerlessness suggests that the first explanation is more likely — that it reflects the emergence and growth of social capital in the local community.
Further research focused on respondents’ attitudes to certain types of motivation for individual behaviour in society. The aim was to test whether ambition is the decisive factor in motivations for individual behaviour (people were asked whether they agreed that ‘to earn the respect of others one has to be ambitious’); or whether behaviour is motivated by norm fulfilment (by assessing agreement with the statement ‘it is necessary to overcome laziness, to be energetic’). Positive attitudes to both kinds of motivation were observed for 70–95 per cent of respondents in all three towns and at all stages of the survey, with positive attitudes to normative motivation being more frequent in every case. Nevertheless over time certain changes in attitude occurred which can be characterised in terms of a weakening of extreme attitudes — a decrease in both strongly positive and strongly negative attitudes. In particular the imperative of ‘being energetic’ eased between 1992 and 1998.
The citizen in local politics
Our conclusions concerning the mutually conditional dependence of general value judgments and attitudes to local politics are based on the strong connection which was observed between attitudes to local politics and feelings of powerlessness. The key attitude towards local politics which was tested in the three towns during the 1990s was whether the possibility of an ordinary citizen influencing the town government has changed since 1989. This can be viewed as an indicator of a positive attitude to the transformation of local society, assuming the possibility of influencing the management of public affairs in towns is regarded as a positive and desirable result of the transformation. The results show that negative attitudes to the transformation (a perception that the possibility of influencing local government has not increased) are fairly infrequent (ranging from 6 per cent in Blatná in 1992 to 20 per cent in Český Krumlov in 1998). Furthermore, there was a demonstrable connection between positive attitudes to transformation and the rejection of feelings of powerlessness.
Other aspects of citizens' attitudes towards local politics were also followed, albeit not in each of the four surveys: do citizens feel competent in local politics; do they feel responsible for decision-making about town affairs and empowered to participate in them both during elections and at other times? Do citizens regard local politics as relevant to their own lives in the local community; are they concerned about decisions of the local government? Do citizens want to participate in managing public affairs; do they feel obliged to ‘meddle’ in them?
The following conclusions apply to the political culture in all the surveyed towns.
• The relevance of local politics for citizens decreased slightly over the last decade, although the proportion of people for whom local political representation is important is constant — about one-fifth in each town. This is in accordance with citizens' attitude to the functioning of local government: the number of people who are entirely ambivalent about its functioning has increased. The implication is that the gap between private and public spheres has widened.
• The competence of citizens in local politics has also changed little: extreme attitudes have softened but approximately half the population of each town does not feel competent to participate in local politics.
• Positive attitudes to participation in public affairs were observed among 30 per cent of citizens in Blatná, 41 per cent of citizens in Český Krumlov and 36 per cent in Velké Meziřící in 1998. This does not constitute any major change over time: there was a small increase in positive attitudes in Velké Mezirící and Český Krumlov and none at all in Blatná.
• Certain attitudes are mutually reinforcing: if citizens feel competent in local politics, they are more likely to find local politics relevant and will feel obliged to participate in decision-making about the town's public affairs.
• Attitudes towards powerlessness and local politics are similarly connected: citizens who feel powerless often regard themselves as incompetent in local politics, view local politics as irrelevant to their private lives and are less inclined to participate in the public affairs of their town.
Conclusion
This chapter has summarised a number of research findings concerning local civic and political cultures in the Czech Republic in the first decade following the collapse of communism. It can be assumed that they point to phenomena quite widely generalisable within post-socialist societies, connected with the struggle by particular communities to manage the complex transformation they are undergoing by redeploying social capital resources, adopting more participative forms of decision-making and governance, and renegotiating the terms of communication and cooperation between local actors and with the external political environment. The dynamics of these processes nevertheless differ in communities of different sizes. In small municipalities there tends to be only a very limited number of people capable of adopting a leadership role in the community, and it was more or less impossible to replace a complete team of leaders after November 1989, which led inevitably to greater continuity in personnel. Moreover the social milieu of a village is such that private and public spheres easily merge into one another and formal roles (within the local council, for instance) are not readily distinguishable from people's informal social prestige, given by their position in local social networks or by their family's social heritage. Therefore the most practical way forward after 1989 was often simply to adapt (incrementally) to new conditions and demands using the same ‘human potential’ as before. Even in the relatively small towns which have been examined in the latter part of this chapter there existed a much larger pool of citizens able and willing to take on civic leadership roles, and the existence of a formal or informal opposition to the governing team has been a factor influencing the dynamics of their civic cultures ever since 1989. A greater degree of anonymity facilitated by larger communities guarantees the existence of a space for constructive opposition and the eventual alternation of local political elites. Correspondingly there is a greater distance between citizens' private and public lives, and the dissemination of new attitudes towards participation in local politics is therefore a potentially smoother process, given that it does not imply such a radical identity crisis. The problem which small town communities have to face is rather the danger of non-participation by citizens, caused by their withdrawal into private affairs or by tendencies towards feelings of powerlessness against the impersonal face of social changes.
Notes
1 Supported by the GA of ČR grant 403/00/1713.
2 The first suggestions for a new territorial administrative arrangement for the Czech Republic were accompanied by the airing of suppressed nationalisms, often voiced by regional nomenclatures and newly established nationalist political parties, which lobbied for the creation of a Moravian or Moravian—Silesian homeland.
3 The following analysis draws on the international comparative research project ‘Learning Democracy’, which was carried out in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1995 and financed by the Norwegian Research Council. The empirical data consisted of written memoirs of councillors or mayors who were elected and served in the first electoral term after the change of regime. The Czech collection of memoirs has sixty-five items: forty-three authors were elected mayor in the first term and most were re-elected in the autumn of 1994; ten contributors are women. The memoirs have different length and content, but most of them cover the following topics: how it came about that they were elected as municipal councillors; local government policy; decision-making; solving specific local issues.
4 In the Czech ‘Learning Democracy’ sample 37 per cent of municipalities had fewer than 2,000 and 50 per cent fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. This actually constitutes a significant under-representation of the smallest municipalities, since nationwide 90 per cent of municipalities have fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, and 60 per cent fewer than 500. A highly significant process during the period immediately after 1989 was the fragmentation of municipalities as a reaction to their forced amalgamation in the 1970s and 1980s which had occurred in the name of effective public administration but often against the wishes of their inhabitants. In 1989 there were around 4,100 municipalities in the Czech Republic, which had increased to 5,800 at the start of 1991, and stabilised at the present level of 6,200 in 1996. The driving force of this process was the desire for independence, but it has often adversely affected communities' developmental potential.
5 From a research project carried out by the Sociological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, ‘Changes in Local Society’, which examined a panel of thirty-five municipalities with 10,000 or fewer inhabitants, based on ‘diaries of events’ compiled by local correspondents during the period leading up to the June general election.
6 Researchers interviewed panels of local elites and representative samples of adult citizens in three Czech towns every two years. The size of the samples was in the range of 400–60 respondents. The surveys focused on attitudes determining political culture and on the social networks of local politicians.
7 In 1997 a survey of local public administration was carried out in the Czech Republic, as part of the international comparative survey financed by the Norwegian Research Council ‘Local Democracy and Innovation II’, the first stage of which had been undertaken in 1992. The countries involved were Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Mayors of towns and municipalities with more than 2,000 inhabitants were interviewed.
8 This section uses the same survey findings cited in note 7.
9 Responses were collated using an ordinal five-point scale, where 1 meant ‘cooperation is unimportant’ and 5 meant ‘cooperation is very important’.
10 Following the re-establishment of municipal self-government, the next step in the reform of public administration intended to strengthen self-governing and democratic tendencies in Czech society was the establishment of regions, as self-governing territorial entities operating at a scale between municipalities and the central state. The debate shifted to and fro in parliament and in the public realm for seven years (Vajdová 2001) about whether to have regions or not, how many and what their competences should be, before a constitutional law was finally passed on the creation of higher territorial self-governing units (VÚSC) in 1997, followed by further necessary legislation which established thirteen regions plus Prague as of spring 2000. The first regional elections then took place in autumn 2000. Turnout was poor at just 33.6 per cent.
11 ‘Outsider syndrome’ was indicated by five statements. Four of them were adopted from Putnam's study (1993: 110) and a fifth was added which was a modification designed to focus on local politics. Respondents were asked to express their agreement on a four-point scale. When factor analysis was applied, one factor explained more than 50 per cent of variance. We labelled it ‘outsider sydrome’.
12 Local Democracy and Innovation (1990–2), Political Culture of Local Communities (1993–5), Cultural Changes in a Czech Locality (1996–8) and Social Networks in a Local Political System (1997–9), supported by GA of ČR and the Czech Academy of Sciences.
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