Suchergebnisse

Current interest in place-based leadership is playing a crucial role in local development. It concerns mainly politicians and public servants. The role of non-profit leaders is still an under-researched topic. Thus, we ask the following research questions: Are rural areas with local action groups (LAGs) more attractive to people than those without? Within rural areas with LAGs, are those with a higher proportion of non-profit partners more attractive to people?
On a sample of 6,262 Czech municipalities, we tested whether membership of municipalities in LAGs and non-profit leadership attributed to positive migration balance. We did it by the application of the propensity score matching method combined with the difference–indifference approach.
We found positive estimates for both LAGs' membership and non-profit leadership on the attractiveness of municipalities. The participation of non-profit leaders makes an important difference. These results underline the importance of bottom-up approaches with voluntary engagement. Moreover, our findings demonstrate contradictory aspects of top-down imposed policies.

This article explores the relationship between the adoption of core party political values and an individual's electoral prospects. Our survey of 355 local candidates in Prague, Budapest and Bratislava shows that many aspiring politicians, including non-profit leaders, make a strategic calculation to adopt core party values in order to improve their prospects of success in running for election in local government. Their willingness to enter a political party may increase the likelihood of their being selected as a candidate. However, it did not improve their chances of being elected. The results suggest that voter behaviour is influenced by other factors and in particular the national standing of political parties. The finding that local political issues are secondary to national politics in city elections casts doubt on the scope for effective local collective action and has implications for our understanding of local leadership and for policies that seek to promote devolution.

Local politicians in Central Europe are actively participating in civil society organizations (NGOs). The socialization of politicians into different roles would affect their political preferences and, therefore, policy outcomes. Thus, we study whether the political values of NGO leaders are aligned differently from those of political party peers who are not engaged in NGOs. We draw our analysis on survey data of 355 local candidates from three large cities: Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest. We analyse the political preferences of local political leaders in the context of the official political preferences of their parties. We also compare the perceptions of elected politicians with those of non-elected politicians, and subsequently analyse the effect of engagement in civil society activity. The results suggest that the local politicians are oriented towards local community values and are less likely to account for the official positions of their political parties. The only factor relating to a candidate's likelihood of election is the presence of a candidate's party in the national parliament.

The book offers though-provoking insights on the performance and effectiveness of EU cohesion policy in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe by highlighting the key achievement and identifying the main shortcomings. One of the most important advantages of the book is that it covers many distinct actions of this policy, the authors also, based on wide-ranging analysis, formulate policy recommendations for the future.

Successful place-based leadership is based on functional networks, dialogue among stakeholders, political support and funding, and sharing power. The EU-funded Integrated Urban Development Plans (IUDPs) require the participation of citizens and local nonprofit organizations. When creating an opportunity for informal leadership, it is not clear whether the informal leadership fills the position of formal political leadership. On the data from the implementation of several IUDPs in the Czech Republic, we tested whether formal leadership becomes dispersed and informal place leadership fills the vacuum instead. Our research did not find differences in the change of civic political engagement at the local level related to the success and failure of the IUDPs strategies. Local civic engagement and nonprofit leadership are challenging formal local political leadership. Nevertheless, their success is limited as there is also missing dialogue among the local movements and nonprofit leaders when finding solutions to particular local problems.

EU Cohesion Policy requires the interaction of public, private and non-profit sectors in policy making. The case of the Czech Republic enables us to identify the major obstacles to the successful implementation of this approach as the Czech population perceives the ability of NGOs to influence policies at the lowest level among all the EU member states. The goal of the study is to identify and explain the determinants of success and failure regarding NGOs' participation in designing public programmes. The methodology includes a combination of in-depth interviews with NGOs' representatives and public servants, a review of official documents, a focus group, and a stakeholders' review of the study's conclusions. The main obstacles to the implementation of the partnership principle are the following: insufficient capacities among NGOs; fluctuations in participating public servants and NGO representatives; dependence of partnership on personal contacts; late start and non-consultative, informative character of partnership.