The local governance and municipalities have always been an important system of the national administrative systems. Therefore, their analysis has had a long tradition in the European social sciences. The different regulations on the municipal administration have been compared by the books, but the approach has been changed by the evolvement of the administrative sciences: comparative local governance and the comparison of the different local socio-economic systems became recent topics of the monographs. 13 municipal systems are analysed by this book. Countries from all part of the European Union are observed by the chapters. The central element of our analysis are the standards defined by the Charter of Local Self-Government in Europe: the implementation of the Charter and the transformation and reforms of the last decades are analysed by them. However, just half of the municipal models of the EU Member States are examined by leading experts of the given countries, but the different faces of the similar trends can be observed by this book. The different ‘faces’ of centralisation and concentration can be seen. The book has a strong legal approach, but the analysis of the local governance is in focus of the book, therefore, it has a wider, social science approach, as well.

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Santrauka. Šiuo straipsniu siekta atskleisti Lietuvos merų politinės karjeros bruožus koncentruojantis į jų patirties Savivaldybės taryboje trukmę prieš pirmą kartą tampant meru ir ĮvadasPolitinės karjeros tyrimai prasidėjo JAV praėjusio šimtmečio šeštajame-septintajame dešimtmetyje. Ši tyrimų kryptis, pradedant garsiuoju Josepho A. Schlesingerio veikalu (1966), vystėsi ir kitose šalyse, iš esmės koncentruodamasi į nacio nalinio lygmens politinį elitą, t. y. JAV kongresmenų, parlamentarų politinės karjeros patirtis (Francis, Kenny 2000). Europoje, kurioje būdinga daugiapakopė valdysena, ta kryptis apėmė ir regioninį lygmenį (Borchert and Stolz 2011;Stolz 2011;Vanlangenakker et al. 2013;Dodeigne 2014). Mokslininkai, tyrę politinio elito karjeros trajektorijas, nustatė, kad negali būti vieno aiškaus modelio "iš apačios į viršų". Šis modelis labiau būdingas JAV, tačiau Europoje, kur egzistuoja daugiapakopis ISSN 2029-4573 (Print), ISSN 2335-8777 (Online) KULTūRA IR VISUOMENė. Socialinių tyrimų žurnalas. 2016 7 (1) http://dx

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This paper contributes to the ongoing debates on the relationship between municipality size and non-electoral citizen participation at the local level. We use the data from Lithuania as a case of strongly consolidated local government structures. We discuss three main points. First, our focus is on the limited question of how municipality size affects the intensity of citizens’ non-electoral participation in local decision-making, taking into account citizens’ participatory capacities, contact with municipal authorities and local agents, and municipal performance evaluations. Second, we consider the specificity of the territorial rescaling policy agenda in Lithuania, which is characterised by the long-term direction of the territorial consolidation process. Third, representative population survey data serve as a reasonable platform for testing the hypothesis on the relationship between different citizen participatory practices and municipality size. We assumed that citizen perceptions of municipal problem-solving capacities, local government accessibility, and assessment of local government performance could vary in municipalities of different size. We also expected to find significant correlation between citizen assessment of municipal performance, local government accessibility (varying by local contact activity), and citizen perception of municipal problem-solving capacities by producing statistical clusters of citizen participatory capacity types. The limitations of quantitative statistical approaches constitute a barrier to explaining the subjective perceptions of local citizens hold about their non-electoral participatory behaviour. Our conclusions demonstrate that the perceived potential of non-electoral democratic participation capacities is relatively limited in both small and large Lithuanian municipalities. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that citizens in large municipalities are more likely to establish local contact activity and have better perceptions of municipal problem-solving capacities than those in small municipalities.

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