Comparative Study of Local Self-Government Models (Case Study of the Slovak and Czech Republic)

Local government is an important part of modern political systems based on the principles of democracy and humanism. It is a fact also in countries that have undergone a democratic transformation after 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. The transformation affected not only the political system as a whole, but all the public administration subsystems too. Ultimately, it was an impulse for the development of democratic processes at the lowest level as well. In this context, we focus on the status of territorial self-government in the conditions of the Slovak and the Czech Republic. These two states were parts of one state unit until 1992. Both countries were based on very similar historical, cultural, social and partly political background. On the other hand, electoral engineering has brought a number of significant differences in the functioning of local self-government from the point of view of public policy actors at the municipal level.