Councillor attitudes to ‘interactive’ governance. Evidence from a survey in five Dutch urban municipalities

Changes and challenges: Local representative democracy in Poland

“…However, through many decades, elected local councils have constituted the heart and essence of local democracy, the trends and reforms implemented in self-government particularly during the last thirty years resulted in a decline of their actual, if not the formal, position. Therefore, in many countries the councils are not considered any more as the primary channel through which citizens' needs and demands are passed for the communication and control of key local political decisions [Denters, Klok 2012] but rather are one of the many local institutions. The change resulted from several issues.…”

“…The solution was adopted inter alia in Italy, England 4 but also in some Central and Eastern European countries such as Poland, Slovakia or Croatia [Berg, Rao 2005;Denters, Rose 2005;Bäck, Heinelt, Magnier 2006]. In many cases, the new intuitional framework implied that the council no longer was able to claim political primacy based on its democratic legitimacy as being the only directly elected local political office [Denters, Klok 2012]. On the other hand, the status and legitimacy of the council was hollowed out by the new, more direct forms of citizens' engagement into governing process.…”