8 Civic potential as a differentiating factor in the development of local communities

Martin Slosiarik

Introduction

In the last decade of the twentieth century Slovak society embarked on a set of social transformations entailing fundamental structural changes. The most significant for the purposes of this chapter was the renewal of the social, political, legal and cultural identity of communities, including the re-establishment of the sovereignty of towns and villages. The manifold problems associated with this ongoing transformation process find expression in the socio-spatial organisation of society at the macro-, meso- and micro-level. Here the focus is on the micro-level, specifically the municipality.

The dispositions of particular territorial communities — in terms of their capacity to adapt to new developmental trends, to activate and effectively utilise their potentials — are varied. In many, residual characteristics such as state paternalism and low awareness of any territorial belonging are still evident. The solution of problems typical for rural settlements requires the removal of barriers inherent in the atomisation of territorial communities, and the creation of an active local society. Extrication from marginalisation demands that local communities not only react to external processes influencing their lives, but above all that they adopt the role of an actor — an active subject oriented toward the solution of existing problems in an attempt to change the situation of the community for the better.

Such an active approach is legitimised by the expansion in the self-governing competences of territorial communities in Slovakia. A change in the legal status of local councils (the 1990 law on municipal government), along with the implementation of civic and political rights, affords each citizen of a municipality the right to participate in decision-making and projecting geared towards improving the settlement conditions of the local community. However participation is conditional on the existence of a certain potential as its source of energy. Below we will argue that the fundamental precondition for participation can be conceived of as civic potential. However we are not suggesting that other potentials (demographic, educational, economic, housing, ecological, etc.) are irrelevant as resources for the development of particular local communities.

During the social transformation tendencies towards disintegration and decentralisation, legitimised by the transfer of competences to the local level, have increased the need for revitalising activities especially in underdeveloped settlements and in settlements earmarked for managed decline by the preceding regime. Many rural villages fall into this group, including the two which form the object of this study — Kvačany and Liptovské Kl'ačany in north-central Slovakia. Our selection of case studies was determined by two sets of considerations:

1 Their structural similarity in terms of demography, the educational levels of the populations, housing and environmental conditions, ethnic and religious affiliations, economic activities and the existence of a certain popular autarky. Previous research (A-projekt 1994a, 1994b, 1994c, 1995) confirmed such structural similarities.

2 A differentiation between the two communities in their recent approach to improving living conditions. Each one initially drew up a local development project as a planning instrument, identifying short-, medium- and long-term aims. Their implementation in both cases explicitly counted on civic activity — the arousal of citizens' interest in their neighbourhood and the quality of life therein. In Kvačany the realisation phase of the project was successfully started and was quickly manifest in a variety of activities leading to improvements in settlement conditions (the setting up of a community foundation, the publication of a monthly magazine about the community and the surrounding micro-region, the restoration of small wooden architectural objects respecting their authentic character, the realisation of mini-grant projects, the establishment of a club for friends (emigrés) of Kvačany, initiatives in agrotourism, annual contests for the most beautiful front garden, brigade work to construct a sewerage system, renovation work on bus shelters, the cemetery, the cultural centre, parks, etc.). On the other hand similar activities have been slow to get started in Liptovské Kl'ačany in spite of the very similar social structural characteristics mentioned above.

This paradox led us to formulate an explanatory hypothesis that the different reactions of the two communities to the demands of social trans-formation are the result of differing levels of human potential, and specifically of civic potential.

Theoretical starting points

Territorial community as an integral social system

One of the theoretical starting points of our analysis, which serves as a broader frame of reference for the conceptualisation of civic potential as a comparative advantage in local development, is a model of social reality grounded in the idea of the social system. The territorial community has an organic character (Pašiak 1990: 72). Even though it does not have a purely social character, its social determination is dominant, and hence we can consider the territorial community as a social system. Here we draw on Schenk's thesis that ‘organic social units are social systems’ (1993: 132). According to Hirner, ‘among the most significant forms of [social system] are a range of territorial social systems from homes, through villages, towns, districts and regions to states. They are characterised by the multitudinous dimensions of their self-realisation’ (1970a: 120). The village — the form of spatial organisation of society most relevant to our research aims — is a relatively closed social system.

Territoriality is a basic identificational marker delimiting places of collective interest in settlement patterns. Pašiak specifies territorial conditions, settlement activities and resulting neighbourhood bonds between people as the basis of territorial communities. It is on this objective base that the particular subjective signifiers of these communities then emerge — consciousness of mutual belonging, cooperation and assistance, shared social norms, elements of self-government, social institutions, a public interest, components of citizenship and civil society (Pašiak 1990). The final layer of a territorial community's self-expression is the municipality with its determining social dimension. Territoriality is, in other words, a necessary but insufficient condition for the emergence of this social dimension.

Self-regulation as a constitutive definition of integral social systems

‘Social systems are self-regulating systems’ (Hirner 1970a: 119). Pašiak (1990) also stresses self-regulation and self-organisation as the essence of the social existence and reproduction of human settlements. In reality it would be more appropriate to speak of relative self-regulation, since ‘in general [social action] is always the product of self-determination and determination by others’ (Schenk 1993: 123). The degree of self-regulation of a social system is given by the degree to which its members participate in governance and the degree to which governance is the product of the self-realisation of individuals.

According to Hirner (1970b) a normally functioning social system comprises a number of relatively open sub-systems, each of which operates with a certain degree of self-regulation, which can be deployed within limits. He adds that each sub-system is partially bound by the need to perform mediatory functions in relation to the coordinating centre of the entire system. Schenk expresses this reality as follows:

Every social system is made up of sub-systems and as an open system is simultaneously a sub-system of a wider system. In this sense it must both respect and to a certain degree regulate two contradictory tendencies — an integrating tendency which ensures its functioning as a component of a higher-order entity, and a self-affirming tendency which enables the strengthening of its own autonomy.

(Schenk 1993: 72)

Abnormal situations can disrupt this balance in one of two ways:

1 If the coordinating centre of the system dominates the self-regulation of the entire system to such an extent that the self-regulation of subsystems is depressed or eliminated.

2 If sub-systems become closed and thereby forego the advantages of participation in the self-regulation of the global social system.

From our perspective the first case is more relevant, specifically in connection with the existence of serious system failures in various spheres of society which are generated by the residual operations of a centralistic administrative-bureaucratic type of social governance which impacts upon territorial communities as social sub-systems. In this case the abnormality is the suppression of self-regulating capacities and the resulting ossification of those components of a sub-system which are the potential instigators of dynamic tension or the carriers of functions which support the durability of the entire system.

In the recent past it was scarcely possible to speak of the self-regulation of territorial communities as a fully effective process. The self-regulation of Slovak municipalities was not fostered by the specific needs of the inhabitants but was deformed insofar as their real needs — as the expression of their inhabiting of a particular place — were not taken into account and were replaced by alien needs enforced from above, presented as the needs of ‘society-wide reconstruction’. Instead of the functional integration of needs generated ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, knowledge of specific local needs was abused to increase the effectiveness of directive administrative governance, the consequence of which was to narrow the space available for the self-realisation of inhabitants of a settlement.

Local government as the self-regulation of territorial communities

One of the most significant systemic changes for territorial communities during the new historical era which began in 1989 in Slovakia (then part of Czechoslovakia) was the restoration of local self-government. Self-administration and self-governance can be considered specific expressions of self-regulation, which we have argued is one of the defining features of social systems. The dominant conception of governance in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia suppressed the self-regulatory mechanisms of territorial communities and thus their practical scope for self-administration:

[The dominant mechanisms of governance involved] the weakening of the civic and moral responsibility of specialists, their indifference to the fate of real people, the undervaluation of the roles and desires of the lay (but sometimes even specialist) public, an exclusive orientation on decision-makers, the self-importance of groups of experts who are sure that they alone know best what people need. Such non-participative, directive approaches to governance … linked to the conviction that there is only one ‘true path', and that is the very one which has been adopted in a given historical moment (often in cabinet, subjectively, through the forcible assertion of a group interest as the ‘societal’ interest), led to damaging manipulation of people. The result was a mode of decision-making about people's living conditions in which no one asked their opinions and in which people were deprived of information about their living conditions.

(Krivý 1989: 344)

The renewal of local self-government in Slovakia

The current stage of the transformation of society involves a continuing search for a suitable model of coordinating public administration and organising the relationship between the state administration and self-government. The process of renewing local self-government is thus a component of the wider process of revitalising civil society. This entails the demonopolisation of power and its diffusion within the structures of civil society. Establishing self-government in towns and villages was an important step in this direction.

The first turning-point in the renewal of local self-government in Slovakia were the council elections of November 1990. One of the explicit aims at that time was to revive local communities, with a series of effects anticipated in the political sphere (the development of local democracy), in the economic sphere (the development of local economies and employment creation), in the social sphere (the stabilisation of social relations and the strengthening of the integrity of territorial communities) and in the cultural sphere (the creation or resuscitation of local cultural traditions).

A dominant role was played by the state in the renewal of Slovak local self-government. The state apparatus planned and implemented the new conception of public administration as part of its broader conception of the democratisation of society and the construction of a democratic state. The 1990 law on municipal government re-established a twin system of public administration in which formally independent local self-government coexisted alongside a state administrative hierarchy. It is therefore difficult to argue that new ‘rules of the game’ emerged as a certain ‘normative extract’ (ibid.), i.e. that they flowed spontaneously from a newly dominant mode of action. The situation was rather one where new rules were ‘declared and installed’ by the state. They will become truly effective rules and thus actual social mechanisms if and only if they are accepted by individuals and groups and reflected in their activities. Societal responses therefore enter the frame as a condition of their ‘self-confirmatory legitimacy’ (ibid.) and thereby a precondition for the consolidation of social transformation. Although structures (rules and roles) regulate human behaviour they do not operate of their own accord. Indeed they are intrinsically associated with permanence, invariability and repeatability, and therefore any tenable reflection on changes in society which have been declared or projected must focus attention on people as the bearers of dynamism in the social sphere.

The relevance of human potential to the self-regulation of territorial communities

Change in rules of play and the nature of roles or social mechanisms regulating human behaviour is inevitable. However the ‘inauguration’ of changes in real life can founder on insufficient human potential, on the inability or unwillingness of individuals and groups to react in an adequate way to new conditions: ‘as well as the fundamental danger that our social rules of play will be changed insufficiently, belatedly or chaotically, a further danger is … inadequate human potential’ (ibid.: 346). In the sphere of local self-government the rules of play in the era of national committees functioned as brakes on social self-regulating mechanisms, and indirectly caused people to apply their own ‘internal brakes’. They have not responded automatically to the release of external brakes:

enterprise, risk, self-sufficient decision-making, responsibility, individual expression, creativity, the development of talents, respect for others, hard work, honour, empathy with suffering — these are after all not unassailable “anthropological constants” … Nor are they variables which can be summoned immediately, at the moment when the need arises.

(Ibid.: 346)

On the other hand, the depletion of human potential (and thus of the potential for self-regulation) cannot of itself justify the formulation of conceptions which treat the individual as a mere object. Nor does it diminish the legitimacy of legislative provisions for local self-government intended to strengthen the self-regulation of territorial communities as subjects of political, economic, social and cultural life.

Civic potential

Adopting the perspective of Potůček (1989), according to whom human potential is an internally structured phenomenon, it follows that the renewal of self-government involves the activation of some of its dimensions, just as the destruction of local self-government means the suppression of particular aspects of human potential. Our assumption is that the renewal of self-government in Slovakia is part of a wider reconstruction of both public administration and civil society. Self-government fulfils many public law functions, whereby it closely corresponds with the state administrative apparatus. However as an autonomous, non-state organisation, with full sovereignty to perform a delimited range of public duties, it belongs to civil society.

Within the state-civil society duality self-government acts as an inter-mediary channel between the individual and the state. … nonetheless it is founded, albeit in miniature, on the same principle as the state, i.e. on the abstract and universal status of the citizen. … Citizenship relates to both the state and to self-government.

(Šamalík 1995: 205)

In participating in the administration of the public affairs of his or her municipality a person is acting as a citizen, and thus in the renewal of the objective conditions for the operation of local self-government it is the citizen and his or her civic potential which becomes the focus of sociological interest.

Correspondingly it was civic potential which was the dimension of human potential suppressed with the destruction of local self-government during the state socialist era. According to Pašiak, for example, the liquidation of municipal democracy meant that ‘citizenship lost its meaning, as citizens became inhabitants and the municipal community perished’ (1991: 23). Sopóci writes that ‘it is only possible to speak of citizens in connection with self-governing communities. … Only in democratic local self-government can citizens assert their rights and freedoms, which flow from their status in the community’ (1993: 4).

According to Schenk ‘it is especially important and useful to investigate the potential of social formations during periods of intensified social dynamism’ (1993: 152). The ongoing transformation of Slovak society is unquestionably such a period, and the attention which has been devoted to the potentials of social formations is a response to the need to identify their internal resources for development, at the same time as it is a response to the continued indifference and passivity of decision-makers to the needs, wishes or entitlements of the citizens of territorial communities.

Reflections on the potential of social formations are reactions to the fact that the possibilities of centralised, directive management of social resources are limited and to the existence of a diverse field of resources which it is not only impossible to activate but even to recognise as resources from the centre. Locally-bound resources can only be integrated into the reproduction of social reality from below …

(Illner 1989: 295)

The concept of civic potential is derived from the concept of citizenship. The historical development of citizenship was long and complex, culminating in the mid-twentieth century, since which time three dimensions of citizenship are discernible: ‘civic, political and social, the combination of which gives individuals the right to participate in the community’ (Wallace 1993: 164). In sociology citizenship is understood as ‘the status which provides all with full membership of a certain community; all who have this status are equal in the rights and responsibilities accruing to it’ (Marshall, in Sopóci 1993: 10). Differences between participant individuals in terms of origin, race, nationality, socio-economic status, religion, ideological or political opinions are irrelevant to their status as citizens, and recent history has also seen the decoupling of civic status from economic position (Dahrendorf 1991). However civic status only expresses the formal aspect of membership of a particular group. At this level all citizens are equal. Differentiation between citizens (in the sense that we may say that one person is a ‘better’ citizen than another) is possible when our attention shifts from civic status to the concept of civic role. This is the dynamic, active side of membership of a particular community.

In terms of our theoretical approach we interpret civic role as the space in which an individual acts as an autokinetic individual (as distinct from the portrayal of an individual reduced exclusively to being the passive enactor of a systemic role by certain sociological approaches). Whenever a role is occupied by a concrete person its realisation is conditioned by his or her socialisation including, in the case of civic roles, the idiosyncratic ways in which a person adopts and utilises all that accrues to his or her civic status. From the perspective of the aims of this study those aspects of civic roles which mobilise people as catalysts for the development and reproduction of terrritorial communities are of greatest relevance. This requires the presence of a certain reservoir of energy which converts civic statuses and civic roles from possibilities into realities. Hirner (1976) expressed these possibilities as the subjective possibilities of the autokinetic member of a social system. The self-regulation and self-administration of a territorial community would be impossible without such a reservoir of energy residing in the subjective possibilities of citizens-inhabitants. They represent ‘the potentials of social systems’ (Schenk 1993: 160) and determine the quality of community self-regulation and the performance of civic roles. In the public life of territorial communities, where a person expresses him- or herself as a citizen, civic potential is the key limiting factor.

Civic potential is thus understood here as a cultural product, an acquired human characteristic, which is internally structured and represents a personality trait necessary for the performance of civic roles in a local context, where an individual generally has to act in cooperation with others for the preservation or alteration of conditions in the territorially restricted environment of their community.

Dimensional analysis of civic potential

In order to operationalise the concept of civic potential it is necessary to break it down into components (dimensions) susceptible to analysis. A first stage was to select the most significant dimensions identified by existing studies. Then we took into account our own research aims and our limitations in terms of data-gathering and empirical testability. Civic potential was thus operationalised as a phenomenon which integrates six dimensions:

• local democratic potential

• legal awareness

• action potential

• associative potential

• information-handling potential

• value systems.

In the following analysis each of these dimensions is characterised by a complex of empirically testable indicators designed to approximate their actual operation. The integration of these partial indicators at a higher level (the level of each dimension) is achieved by constructing synthetic indicators (indices).

Dimension 1: local democratic potential

The indicators of this dimension of civic potential were chosen in order to identify the readiness and willingness of inhabitants of territorial communities to defend the civil, political and social rights of one group of residents against infringement by another group. If a critical mass of citizens is not prepared to guarantee the opportunities for participation which flow from the constitution and the law on municipal government, or if a civic attitude is not adequately expressed in congruent patterns of behaviour, self-government may develop along lines different from those envisaged at the moment of its renewal: rather than strengthening local democracy and expanding the opportunities for citizens to administer and determine the affairs of their communites it may instead create space for the assertion of various particular interests associated with local political or economic actors without regard for the overall interests of the com-munity and its ordinary citizens.

To prevent this process citizens must dispose of a certain level of democratic potential in the local context, expressed as respect for the rights of minorities (meaning minority views rather than ethnic minorities), respect for the rights of every citizen-inhabitant to elect and stand for election to the local council, to vote in local referenda, to take part in local council sessions or other public meetings, to address suggestions and complaints to the municipal authorities, to make use of municipal facilities and publicly accessible communal property, to set up civic initiatives, associations or clubs at the level of the community, and so forth. Local democratic potential thereby delimits our capacity as citizens to prevent or expedite the formation of ‘small-scale totalitarian structures’ (Gorzelak 1992).

In Kvačany and Liptovské Kl'ačany we set out to determine whether certain groups of citizens were subject to discrimination or were denied an equal chance to exercise their rights in relation to municipal self-administration. We attempted to measure citizens’ propensity to resolve a series of hypothetical situations in the public life of the community either in harmony or in contradiction with democratic principles anchored in the Slovak constitution and the law on municipal government. We did so by adapting the method of testing democratic potential formulated by Roško (1994) on the basis of ‘action models’ — describing a number of problem situations and asking respondents to indicate agreement or disagreement with various proposed solutions (see Table 8.1 on p. 178).

Dimension 2: legal awareness

The degree of legal awareness citizens possess has an obvious relevance to their reactions to the suppression of others' civil, political or social rights. It denotes that aspect of their cognitive armoury which relates most directly to their citizenship. Whereas for dimension 1 we tested citizens' preferences for democratic solutions in certain modelled situations, here our priority was to discover how well versed they were in democratic legal provisions. One citizen may be an ‘intuitive democrat’, whose democratic decisions are informed ‘by the heart rather than the head’, whilst another may act non-democratically even though he or she is fully cognisant of democratic provisions. Legal awareness is a product of an individual's acculturation and socialisation, as Stena stressed when identifying public education in citizenship and democracy as a key orientation point in the path of extrication from post-communism (1993). In measuring legal awareness we made use of the same modelled situations as before, this time asking respondents to evaluate each proposed solution in terms of its compatibility with the Slovak legal system.

Dimension 3: action potential

Whereas local democratic potential was understood in terms of negative freedom (freedom from), action potential accentuates positive freedom (freedom to). Negative freedom involves the defence of one's actions from interference by others:

Whether the principle in terms of which we define the sphere of non-intervention is derived from natural law or natural rights, the usefulness or the demands of a categorical imperative, the sacredness of a social contract or any other concept by which people seek clarification and justification for their convictions, this type of freedom means freedom from; the elimination of intervention beyond a certain boundary which moves but is always recognisable.

(Berlin 1993: 27–8)

In our case, when we tested local democratic potential, this boundary was taken as the existing legal order. However citizenship also provides citizens with positive freedoms ultimately deriving from their desire if not for complete independence then at least to participate in the processes and conditions by which their lives are determined:

People want to be subjects not objects, to be led by their own reason and conscious goals and not by causes which impact upon them from outside. They want to be someone and not no one; someone who decides; someone who exerts self-control and not someone who acts according to the signals of the external environment or other people as if a thing, an animal or a slave, unable to play the role of a human being, i.e. to construct their own aims and rules and realise them.

(Ibid.: 31)

Sartori also offers the opinion that true self-government ‘demands the actual presence and participation of interested people’ (1993: 285).

As an expression of the positive freedom of citizens-inhabitants of a settlement, action potential captures their potential for participation in the formation and reproduction of a relatively autonomous local community. At the local level the solution to problems often falls predominantly on the local council, which is expected to initiate solutions, create conditions, to take care of.

Obviously it cannot be said that these expectations are misplaced — after all it is an elected government or parliament in miniature, which has accepted a measure of responsibility. But there is one caveat, because local democracy does not end with the election of the mayor and councillors.

(Falt'an 1993a: 12)

According to Čambáliková,

From the perspective of the substance of civic participation it is impossible to ignore the objection that elections are a fundamental but discontinuous act, just as it is impossible to ignore the fact that a discontinuity exists between the choices made in elections and actual government decisions.

(Cambáliková 1996: 51)

A self-governing community must therefore initiate activities not only towards the council but also directly as the self-sufficient supplier of many of its own needs. Action potential should ultimately express the location of our respondents on the axis between public passivity and public activism.

The source of action potential is the internal dynamic of social problems, since it is during their solution that participation is generally provoked. This internal tension is the result of contradictions between the needs of inhabitants of a place and the conditions for their satisfaction. Participation in solving local problems is most likely to arise in those areas of public life where there is dissatisfaction with the prevailing state, since this is where citizens' intervention is called for. The willingness of a citizen-inhabitant to participate in addressing various inadequacies in settlement conditions can take many different forms, from a total refusal to participate, through the organisation of petitions, participation in sessions of the local council, interrogation of councillors, formulation of suggestions for solving particular problems, all the way up to the actual realisation of projects to improve conditions in the community (for example through voluntary work).

In order to identify the various aspects (partial indicators) of local settlement conditions about which it would be most appropriate to ask respondents we identified areas of likely tension in the public life of the communities, leaving aside disputes between individuals and families. The following issues were included:

• the cleanliness of public spaces

• sewerage

• funeral arrangements

• leisure facilities (sports pitches, childrens' playgrounds, clubs, etc.)

• green space

• the quality of roads

• the quality of street lighting

• flood control

• religious facilities

• waste disposal

• pavements

• security / crime

• job opportunities

• fire safety

• cultural facilities (cultural centre, library, etc.)

• provision of places for relaxation (e.g. benches for sitting)

• promotion of the municipality.

Dimension 4: associative potential

To consider a person as a citizen necessitates consideration of their involvement in civic associations, whether these have a public, charitable or interest-based (recreational) mission. The civic right of association represents a particular form of power available to individuals in pursuit of their goals. Associative potential can therefore be defined in the local context as the ability of citizens-inhabitants to form associations of a political or non-political character for the purposes of satisfying a need. The stimulus for the emergence of associations is given by the fact that certain needs can only be satisfied collectively. We are concerned here with associations of an instrumental character which demand that citizens express the will to become a member, as distinct from natural collectivities like the family, community or state, where the acquisition of membership is not an intentional act.

Both political and non-political associations articulate group interests and expectations in relation to local representative organs, or attempt to find allies (representatives) within such organs. They thereby become an important information channel, forcing local politics to respond to the articulation of collective interests. At the same time association, especially of an interest-based or recreational character, functions through the self-fulfilment of interests and needs at the local level. ‘Such a “self-organising mechanism” is needed mainly at the local level, and above all in rural settlements, where local government often need not or cannot satisfy all [the community's needs]’ (Falt 'an 1993b: 14).

A precondition for the renewal of civil society in Slovakia is social differentiation — the dismantling of monolithic bonds and structures. Following the collapse of communism

[differentiation] was evident in the proliferation of self-help groups, supportive associations and local civic initiatives. Many of them are completely new initiatives in public life, others renewed their existence or came out of illegality. An increase in subjectivity is apparent both in the numerical pluralisation of forms of public representation and, more profoundly, in the heightened autonomy of populations hitherto reduced to an object of decision-making, insofar as the formation of associations has occurred spontaneously, without external direction, and as a direct expression of a population's identity.

(Stena 1991: 10)

In many cases a continuity is apparent in the activity, interests and goals of civic association: some groups, that is, carry out the same activities as before 1989, although by attaining full legal subjectivity new possibilities are open to them. Examples include sports and physical education clubs, activity circles, hunting societies, voluntary fire brigades or common land boards. A further category of civic initiatives common in rural areas includes charitable and humanitarian organisations like the Catholic organisation Charita and the Red Cross, which are oriented not towards the satisfaction of the group's own needs but towards service to others. Associations promoting the development of national traditions, Slovak culture and history, such as branches of Matica Slovenská or amateur dramatics societies, fulfil a similar role in community life. In both cases such organisations build upon traditional patterns of associative activity strongly embedded in rural communities, which simultaneously become resources enabling their response to emerging social conditions. A new phenomenon, on the other hand, is the establishment of associations of citizens oriented towards new values, such as those promoting local democracy, legal awareness or civic participation in the determination, processing and presentation of know-how related to the functioning of rural communities. These include community coalitions and foundations like that described below, or by Smith elsewhere in this volume.

All the above associations, which cover the most commonly occurring types at the local level in Slovakia, have in common an apolitical character, or better a civic orientation (which does not preclude their interaction with local government). Of course there are also forms of association of an explicitly political nature whose logic is not merely to pursue collective interests but to gain a share of power within the local community proportional to their support among the citizens of the municipality. Generally speaking we are talking about local branches of political parties. Since this is seen as a qualitatively different type of associative activity, our investigation of associative potential distinguished between political and non-political (recreational, charitable or public educational) association as two fundamental sub-types of this dimension of civic potential.

Dimension 5: information-handling potential (informedness)

It is unrealistic to expect people to adopt responsible civic attitudes as long as they are insufficiently informed about the life of the territorial community. A citizen's participation in the development of the community is related to his or her potential to handle information both as a receiver of information about the life of the community and as a bearer of information about his or her own needs, entitlements and desires. For the purposes of this study, however, we concentrated on a certain segment of inhabitants’ information-handling potential, namely the degree of their ‘informational saturation’ or informedness about local public affairs.

Each citizen has the right to receive information. Citizens' overall informedness about public affairs ought to engender motivation to participate in solving problems and to act responsibly in relation to the cultivation of the local environment. Only an informed citizen can comprehend a problem and weigh up advantages and disadvantages as they impinge upon him- or herself and the community as a whole:

Research in other countries as well as in Slovak towns has documented how greater informedness of citizens about their town as a complex administrative system stimulates more active participation in its management and development and more active involvement in the cultivation of the built and natural environments.

(Gajdoš 1994: 454)

This observation undoubtedly applies to rural communities too.

Given that we have operationalised this dimension in relation to the citizen as information receiver our research excludes consideration of both the source of information and the accessibility of information on local public affairs. This reduction was undertaken consciously, in view of the difficulty we would have had in operationalising a more holistic (internally unstructured) conception of information-handling potential empirically. In practical terms, what we did was to identify several important areas of public life and ascertain the degree of informedness of citizens about:

• cultural events organised in the municipality

• the agenda of recent local council sessions

• decisions taken by the mayor

• the work of the municipal authority

• existing problems in the community

• suggestions for the solution of the above problems

• the activities of civic associations in the community

• local development plans.

Dimension 6: value systems

The final dimension of our analysis of civic potential expresses citizens' preferences for particular culturally grounded value systems which may strengthen or weaken their chances of participation in public affairs. Value systems function to sustain a relatively stable relationship between individuals and social reality. The concept of vertical structuration of social phenomena identifies values as one of the deepest levels of social reality, which inform its more superficial expressions (Laiferová 1993 (after Gurvitch)). Even when circumstances, living conditions or even entire political and economic systems change, value orientations have a greater inertia. In our research situation this means that even when citizens have acquired civic and political rights, and even when they have begun to participate actively in the functioning of municipal communities, they may not necessarily fully utilise their rights in practice. The full utilisation of rights is limited by preferences for particular values, that is by the ‘value-loading’ of citizens-inhabitants.

A number of recent sociological studies have documented apathy as a dominant pattern of civic behaviour in Slovakia. Our assumption is that the dominance of this pattern is the result of the saturation of society by certain value preferences which can be referred to as communitarian. By this we understand ‘a certain type of relation which becomes established in a given society or community on the basis of social shortage, economic inefficiency, legal uncertainty, an absence of political democracy and so on’ (Turčan 1993: 234). Communitarianism finds expression in value preferences such as: take more than you give, risk-free gain, recognition and respect without responsibility, avoidance of discussion of life's fundamentals, fear of drawing attention to oneself, low self-sufficiency, lack of individual responsibility for public affairs, the disappearance of the individual as an actor as a result of the dominance of impersonal mechanisms, reliance on others — above all the state. These characteristics became strongly established in totalitarian political systems with their pronounced anti-individual tendency:

Communitarianism became diffused throughout the entire mechanism for the functioning of society and of the individual within society. With a change in the mode of development, as tendencies evolve towards the application of democratic procedures within the mechanisms of society, communitarianism becomes a relational type with an anti-civic influence on human action, in particular in the case of communitarian trends transferred from the [pre-1989] era such as the rejection of public forms of the pursuit of interests and citizens' demands, the prioritisation of private interests, withdrawal to one's own private sphere in order to have a peaceful life, and so forth.

(Ibid.: 235)

What enables individuals to transcend this condition is commitment to the values of freedom, the rule of law, independence and engagement in public affairs and social problems, as the opposite of indifference, blindness and apathy.

In an attempt to empirically map the distribution of this dimension among respondents in the two villages we asked them to judge the following concepts: enterprise, self-sufficient decision-making, acceptance of responsibility, free expression, creativity, honour, hard work, respect for others, the possibility of setting up private businesses, the possibility of influencing public affairs, education, opinion plurality. In each case they were to award the concept a mark on a five-point scale according to the degree of its importance to their own life.

Civic potential as an integrated variable

Although we have broken down civic potential analytically into six dimensions, our ultimate aim was to construct an overall index of civic potential. In order to do so we weighted each of the partial indices (represented by the six dimensions) equally, having standardised them by means of trans-formation on to a scale from zero to one.

Research findings

In each village our panel of respondents constituted a random sample of the adult population, using the electoral register: in Kvačany we interviewed sixty of the 415 registered voters, in Liptovské Kl'ačany forty out of 270.

Local democratic potential

At the most general level there were significant differences between the two samples. In Kvačany the average index for local democratic potential worked out at 0.9375, but in Liptovské Kl'ačany only 0.800: this implies that there is a higher probability that situations arising in the public life of Kvačany will be resolved in accordance with democratic procedures. Further analysis showed that the greatest difference between the two communities occurred in the case of attitudes toward the communist era. Some 40 per cent of respondents from Liptovské Kl'ačany supported discrimination against people with a communist past, advocating their disqualification from access to local public office (as candidates for the local council). A high proportion of the community would thus deny another group of citizens the right to exercise their active electoral right to participate in the self-government of the municipality. In Kvačany such a stance was taken by only 10 per cent of respondents.

The second largest difference was recorded when respondents were asked to consider the relationship of citizens to the local council: 15 per cent of the Liptovksé Kl'ačany sample favoured censorship of criticism of the council, which would undermine public control of council activity and constructive cooperation between local decision-makers and the other inhabitants of the settlement. In Kvačany only 1.7 per cent of respondents took such a non-democratic stance.

Legal awareness

Indices of legal awareness worked out roughly the same in each settlement, but were lower than the indices of democratic potential — 0.6125 in Kvačany and 0.6250 in Liptovské Kl'ačany. Whereas when testing local democratic potential more citizens of Kvačany chose democratic solutions in every single modelled situation, this was not the case when we tested respondents' legal awareness for the same situations. In other words many of the respondents in Kvačany are intuitive democrats, who are inclined to resolve situations in accordance with democratic procedures, even though they lack formal knowledge of the latter. The presence of such a type of civic potential can generally be viewed as a positive factor for the healthy functioning of a territorial community in spite of the fact that an element of uncertainty surrounds behavioural patterns which are only ‘intuitively’ democratic.

In Liptovské Kl'ačany correlation of the first two data-sets reveals the presence of a relatively high number of ‘unconscious non-democrats’ (those who choose non-democratic solutions without being aware of doing so). In the case of this type of civic potential there are legitimate fears that support could grow for discriminatory practices in local public life. Table 8.1 compares the results of democratic potential and legal awareness tests in the two communities.

Action potential

Action potential is viewed here as an especially important dimension of civic potential given that a key research aim was to identify factors potentially promoting local development: it has a particularly direct influence on the character of public life and the improvement of living conditions in the locality. Here we found a statistically significant difference between the two villages in favour of Kvačany, which had an index of action potential of 0.4595, compared with 0.2565 in Liptovské Kl'ačany. Orientationally, this

Table 8.1 Occurrence of different types of ‘democrat’ according to responses to action models (figures are percentages)

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4
Kvačany
Conscious democrats	46.7	51.7	60.0	75.0
Unconscious democrats	50.0	38.3	30.0	23.3
Conscious non-democrats	0.0	3.3	6.7	0.0
Unconscious non-democrats	3.3	6.7	3.3	1.7
Liptovské Kl'ačany
Conscious democrats	55.0	55.0	67.5	62.5
Unconscious democrats	35.0	5.0	20.0	22.5
Conscious non-democrats	0.0	10.0	0.0	0.0
Unconscious non-democrats	10.0	30.0	12.5	15.0

implies that the former community is capable of activising about 46 per cent of its theoretical maximum of action potential in the solution of local problems concerning the quality of community life, but the latter only about 26 per cent.

Respondents in Liptovské Kl'ačany were much more liable to express dissatisfaction with the quality of the lived environment, which is logical given that a number of developmental projects have already brought about considerable improvements in living conditions in Kvačany. However the index tests the willingness of only the unsatisfied respondents to participate in solutions to the source of their complaint, and in every case this was higher in Kvačany: in seven areas of public life more than 50 per cent of dissatisfied citizens were ready to take part personally in carrying out improvements (cleanliness of public spaces, religious facilities, leisure facilities, green space, funeral arrangements, cultural facilities and provision of places for relaxation). Only in one area (leisure facilities) was this so in Liptovské Kl'ačany.

The lowest degrees of action potential in both settlements were recorded in respect of waste disposal, sewerage, fire safety, job opportunities, the quality of roads, security and street lighting. In these areas respondents evidently expected more substantial intervention from their elected local representatives or from the organs of the state administration. Table 8.2 compares the results of action potential tests in the two communities.

Table 8.2 Percentage of respondents who expressed a willingness to participate actively in solving local problems

	Kvačany	L. Kl'ačany	ë2	Significance
Cleanliness of public spaces	81.0	47.2	9.74	*0.020
State of religious facilities	72.2	28.6	8.00	**0.005
Leisure facilities	71.4	60.0	1.08	0.299
Green space	71.4	43.7	3.92	*0.048
Funeral arrangements	69.2	37.5	3.74	0.530
Cultural facilities	62.5	9.5	11.63	**0.001
Places for relaxation	61.9	44.7	4.60	0.207
Promotion of municipality	47.4	25.9	2.26	0.133
Flood control	40.5	11.1	5.02	*0.025
Pavements	40.0	13.8	4.80	*0.028
Waste disposal	38.9	3.7	10.53	**0.001
Sewerage	35.6	23.1	1.73	0.188
Fire safety	33.3	10.3	3.79	0.052
Job opportunities	30.4	2.9	10.27	*0.001
Quality of roads	30.4	13.9	3.11	0.078
Security/crime	27.6	7.7	3.65	0.056
Quality of street lighting	20.0	10.0	0.87	0.352

Associative potential

Our findings also revealed a statistically significant difference between the two territorial communities in terms of associative potential, for which respondents' answers produced indices of 0.3375 in Kvačany and 0.1875 in Liptovské Kl'ačany: inhabitants of the former showed a greater willingness to associate in order to deal with local issues. Of course associative potential is in both cases absorbed (to a certain degree) by actual involvement in political and non-political organisations. In Kvačany just 6.7 per cent and in Liptovské Kl'ačany 7.5 per cent of respondents said they were members of local political organisations; but 73.3 per cent and 47.5 per cent respectively were organised in non-political associations. Given some overlap in membership of the two types of association, this meant that overall 77.0 per cent of respondents in Kvačany and 53.0 per cent of respondents in Liptovské Kl'ačany were organised. Of these members, 68.2 per cent in Kvačany but a mere 17.5 per cent in Liptovské Kl'ačany considered their membership as ‘active’.

In Kvačany the following voluntary organisations exist (excluding political parties): the Red Cross, the Union of anti-fascist veterans, a voluntary fire brigade, a sports club, a hunting club covering the wider micro-region, a common land board, an amateur theatre company, a youth union branch and the Oblazy foundation. In Liptovské Kl'ačany there is also a branch of the Red Cross, a voluntary fire brigade and a common land board, as well as a local organisation of Matica Slovenská. But the difference between the two communities lies less in the number of organisations represented and more in the activity of members: this is indirectly indicated by the greater extent of cross-membership of different organisations in Kvačany, which has demonstrably enabled more effective mutual communication and cooperation in local development. A critical role is played here by the one ‘non-traditional’ organisation in the above list, Oblazy. This community foundation integrated several of Kvačany's opinion-leaders, including the mayor, the head of the local agricultural cooperative (the main employer in the village), the Catholic priest and the head of the primary school. All of these are active members of other social organisations, which was important in popularising the foundation's aims within the community. It thereby quickly acquired popular legitimacy and was able to mobilise people to take part in several public works projects to improve local living conditions. For although the majority of financial resources it utilises come from external grant programmes, in each case they are conditional on local participation: grants have been obtained to purchase various items of equipment, but the work itself has been performed by Kvačany's citizens.

Information-handling potential (informedness)

The indices produced to estimate the informedness of inhabitants of the two communities about local affairs did not indicate any significant difference at the most general level, even if respondents in Kvačany were slightly better informed (0.6325) than those in Liptovské Kl'ačany (0.5975). However partial indicators reveal some more interesting trends. In both settlements citizens are apparently best informed about cultural events: 90 per cent felt well informed in Kvačany and 80 per cent in Liptovské Kl'ačany. Informedness about existing problems in the community was about 75 per cent in both cases. There were big differences with respect to information about mayoral decisions and civic associations' activities: in the former case respondents from Liptovské Kl'ačany felt better informed, by 72 per cent to 49 per cent, whereas more respondents from Kvačany knew about their local civic associations (55 per cent to 30 per cent).

Value orientations

Our index of value orientations was slightly higher in Kvačany (0.8328) than Liptovské Kl'ačany (0.7570) but the difference is not statistically significant. It bears repeating that the index attempts to place respondents' value orientations on a hypothetical scale between communitarian and ‘anti-communitarian’ values: the high values indicate that both populations tend to adopt an anti-communitarian stance on most issues, and tend towards a responsible mode of civic behaviour. However given our findings with regard to local democratic, associative and action potential, it is clear that these declared values are not always manifest in other dimensions of civic potential, particularly in Liptovské Kl'ačany.

Table 8.3 Indices of civic potential dimensions in Kvačany and Liptovské Kl'ačany

Civic potential: summary

Aggregating the indices for each of the six dimensions of civic potential, we arrive at values of 0.6354 for Kvačany and 0.5439 for Liptovské Kl'ačany, which is a statistically significant difference in favour of Kvačany. Table 8.3 summarises the survey findings, with statistically significant differences highlighted.

The greatest differences between the two populations were apparent in the dimensions local democratic potential, action potential and associative potential, whereas insignificant differences were found in the dimensions legal awareness, information-handling potential and value orientations. In other words, there was little or no difference in those aspects of civic potential where citizen and community act and reproduce themselves in the realm of knowledge or consciousness (through cognitive transactions); but where citizen and community act and reproduce in the sphere of being or behaviour (manifesting cognition in the performance of citizenship) significant distinctions were observed. This clearly has important consequences for the resultant activities of each community in the improvement of living standards and settlement conditions.

Conclusion

The renewal of local self-government thrust Slovak settlements and their inhabitants into new situations: the reassertion of the principle of self-government opened the way for participation in the life and development of settlements by locally active subjects. This chapter has identified and analysed (on the basis of an empirical study in two villages) one important factor — civic potential — which differentiates between small local communities in terms of their potential to influence their own development, notwithstanding similar initial conditions in terms of such factors as demographic, economic or ecological characteristics.

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