Independent Mayors and Local Lists in Large Polish Cities: Towards a Non-partisan Model of Local Government?

Abstract

The enormous success of local independent lists and independent mayors in Poland suggests it is important to examine their distinctive features, analyse the place they occupy in local politics, and explore the model of local government they encourage. This paper deals with these topics by investigating some extreme cases of non-partisanship at the local level. Research was conducted in three arbitrarily chosen Polish cities governed by independent mayors and dominated by independent lists in the local legislatures. Mixed quantitative and qualitative methods were used: a survey among city councillors; and individual key-informant interviews (IDI). Non-partisans appear to be a separate category of local politicians, different in terms of their views on politics. They explain their non-partisanship using anti-partisan, historical or tactical justifications. It seems that non-partisanship can be a means of institutionalising a particular manner of understanding and engaging in politics. Local lists organised by independent mayors are informal, concentrating on the leader and performing only some of the traditional functions of parties. This paper demonstrates that, due to the vague nature of the links between local politicians and their administration, independent councillors may serve only as a ‘democratic addition’ to a local administration headed by a skilful manager.

Key Words:

• Local politics
• non-partisanship
• independent lists
• Poland

Notes

A more comprehensive description of Polish local government system can be found in Regulski (1999) or Kowalczyk (2000).

More about the extreme cases selection as a method of purposeful sampling in qualitative research can be found in Patton (1990, p. 230–233).

Each statement was scored by the respondents on a scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), the scores of the reversed statements were adjusted to reflect the same direction of the non-reversed statements, then values of each statement were summarised to create indices and standardised to the range (0,1).

This calculation is possible thanks to the fact that elections of mayors and councillors take place simultaneously (i.e. nearly the same population of voters participate in the two polls). Thus, a simple indicator of the strength of a candidate's political background can be constructed: percentage of votes cast to the candidate divided by percentage of votes cast to the list supporting this candidate. Values below 1 signal that candidates for councillorship (asa list) dominate a candidate for mayor; values above 1 can be interpreted as an indicator of the supremacy of a candidate for mayor and, in consequence, the weakness of a list supporting him or her. An average indicator for independent lists, calculated for the 65 largest cities in Poland, was 1.85 (sd = 0.85) in 2002 and 2.40 (sd = 0.86) in 2006.