Direct Election of Mayors and Quality of Local Democracy in Lithuania

The aim of this paper is to assess the effects on the quality of local democracy in Lithuania since the introduction of popularly elected mayors in 2015. In the last decades, countries of Western Europe face a decline of political participation and trust in the traditional institutions of representative democracy. New democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have similar problems. Answers to these challenges try to deepen the democracy by introducing additional elements and expanding them to various levels of government. One particular measure that aims to combat the decline in citizen dissatisfaction is introduction of directly elected mayors. However, question about the effectiveness of this remedy remains: does the direct election of mayors really increase the quality of democracy? Existing literature is inconclusive. Moreover, due to small share of studies on the post-communist CEE countries in the research on local government, region with higher spread of this reform (if compared to the democracies of Western Europe) remains understudied. Lithuania presents a convenient case to test how introducing the direct election of mayors affects the quality of democracy. The major advantage for our study lies in the fact that government adopted institutional reform quite recently (in 2015). It makes Lithuanian case important in two regards. First, it is possible to test if reform brought similar effects as in the established Western democracies. Second, our case contributes to the discussion if such an institutional design increases the quality of democracy in CEE and in general. This paper covers three periods (pre-reform, reform and post-reform) and focuses on three main political effects, namely the political participation, accountability and stability of local government. Analysis is based on the descriptive statistics and regression models that capture the trends in the political participation and accountability, as well as on the qualitative analysis that aims to evaluate how the stability of local government changed after the reform. Preliminary conclusions are that even though participation did not increase significantly, accountability improved somewhat and stability of local government strengthened.