Low relevance local state-society networks and challenge of civic actors in CEE region

The paper focuses on explaining low relevance local state-society networks in CEE region, especially turning the attention to the role of civic actors in local politics. CEE region is characterized by newly build democratic governance system that was facing many legal, institutional and organizational challenges. First, the institutions were generally weak, and some countries even lacked the bureaucratic capacity and managerial skills. Second, the prospect of establishing a well-functioning local-state relationship seemed to be gloom as the CEE countries lack solid civic participation and institutional trust (Howard 2002). The characteristics of the CEE region are that the systems of local state-society relations are identified as local elitists (Sellers and Kwak 2011: 626), where the civil society remains less organized and less broadly mobilized through the network of civic organizations. Our paper presents the survey results of general dataset from our survey on "Local state-society relations" performed in 20 European countries in 2021. For our analytical purposes we use data from CEE region countries (Czech Republic, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland) that allows us to measure and explain the level of relevance in specific policy fields and the role of different actors in the networks. The statistical analysis results indicate that as the most skeptical to the relevance of the networks are the societal (civic) actors, in sharp contrast to all other European countries, Although the CEE regions rather lack consociational or corporatist forms of governance on the local level (Sellers et al., 2020), the results also suggest huge differences across particular networks due to their political field and agenda (Heinelt et al., 2021).