National parties in local government: agencies and congregations in Hungary *

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1 FIRST DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR S PERMISSION. Gábor DOBOS Institute for Political Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences National parties in local government: agencies and congregations in Hungary * Introduction local parties from different perspectives In modern societies, local governments are valuable components of the democratic systems. Their position within the political structure is special: as substantial and integrated parts of the state, they are institutions closest to the citizens. They gain their legitimacy from the (national) legislature but they are also rooted in local society. This dichotomy is present in the politics of the local level too: local politics is obviously about locality, but with the appearance of the national parties, it is also linked to the national level of politics. The study examines this relationship between the national and local politics, with special regard to the behavior of the party-affiliated politicians in the local councils. With a minimal definition, the political party can be characterized as organization that presents at elections, and capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office (Sartori, 1976:64). To define local party, one can use Hans Geser s classification, who distinguishes two types: - local parties as segments of the larger (national) party organizations, - local parties as actors within the communal political systems. (Geser, 1999:3) These party types are different in their formation as their development can be described by opposite processes: the national parties try to build their organizational network to reach the society and their potential voters (top-down process), while the second type of local parties are rooted in the local communities and their aim is to represent the local society on different levels of political system (bottom-up process). It seems obvious, why want local actors participate in the local politics (it can be identified as the part of the autonomy of the local communities), but it is important to examine the * The author would like to express his sincere appreciation to Adrienn Tóth (PhD student at the Corvinus University of Budapest) for her enthusiastic work with the interviews and the data-collection for this project. 1

2 motivations of the national parties to reach the local level. Geser argues that the local branches have several functions in the development of the national parties: - the local segments offer opportunity (a training ground )to the rookie politicians to get experiences about the functioning of the politics, - they are also offer a field for the national party to experiment e.g. with new campaign strategies, coalition forming, problem solving etc., - the activities of local branches can increase the cohesion of the party organizations through the strengthening of solidarity motivations of the membership, - these communal party sections offer infrastructure and cheap labour force of volunteering amateurs to the central party (e.g. for campaign management), - the local segments function as local marketing agencies : they make the parties programs, ideologies and policy positions known, while they can adopt the parties strategies to the local conditions, - they can translate the general ideologies of the national party to the local issues, - they make easier to the party to adopt to changing political environment, - the local branches are able to involve individuals from more marginal social groups too. (Geser, 1999:6-13) These functions show that local party branches are valuable resources to the national party organizations. The paper examines the topic from the opposite viewpoint, and looking for the answer to the following questions: How important is the national party background to the local politicians, how influences it their behaviour and work in the local governments? The study does not focus on why want the political actors become party candidates (about the incentives to join an organization, see Clark and Wilson, 1961), instead it investigates the effects of party-affiliation on the local governments. Through semi-structured interviews I tried to explore if the representatives of the parties primarily serve as agents of the party centre, or are they committed to furthering local interests first, using their party attachments in the advantage of reaching their goals. In the following chapter I examine the Hungarian local politics and argue that there are no traditional local parties, but one can observe an increasing presence of national parties on subnational levels. The chapter offers a framework from macro-perspective to the interpretation of the first results of an ongoing project, which is introduced in the subsequent chapter. The aim of the research is to give a better insight into the relations of national and local politics in the local governments. 2

3 Politics on the sub-national levels in Hungary The post-transition development of the local politics in Hungary can be interpreted as a reaction to the local government system in the communist regime: while the local governments before the transition had marginal role (as they were controlled through the local branches of the communist state-party), the cornerstone of the reform in 1990 was the reestablishment of the fully autonomous elected local governments in the name of the one municipality one local government principle. The creators of the new Hungarian political system emphasized the autonomy of the local communities and expected them to build their own local structures 1. The heritage of the past regime (the communist party s supervision over the local communities) led to the question: how should local politics look like in Hungary? Should they either prevent the appearance of the national parties in the local communities and strengthen its locality or let national parties in and surrender local politics to them? Is the local politics about the local issues or about the national politics on local level? The debate led to a compromise between the bottom-up and top-down politics through the local electoral system: in the settlements under inhabitants there is a plurality formula with block vote system in use, and above this limit they apply mixed formula with compensatory lists. The block vote system helps the selection of individual candidates and the compensatory lists let in the national political actors to the local level (Kákai, 2004:122), as the list system forces the political actors to establish organizations to compete in elections (Soós, n.d.:2). This separation clearly determines the political profiles of the local governments (Swianiewicz and Mielczarek, 2005:20): ca. 80 percent of the elected representatives and mayors are independent candidates in the municipalities under the limit, and there are only a few (ca percent) independent candidates in the larger communities (Pálné, 2008:232). Beside the independent local representatives and candidates of the national parties there are no traditional local parties (the second type of Geser s classification), although NGOs are running for positions in the local councils. They are civil organizations both regarding their political functioning and legal status: their only real political activity is the participation in 1 This resulted in a dysfunctional, fragmented local government system, which was hard to modify (see Dobos and Soós, 2013): every time the central state (and the governing forces) tried to rationalize the structure, the opposition argued that this can be considered as an offence to the autonomy of the local governments. 3

4 local/regional electoral competition and they are regulated in the Hungarian law differently than the national parties even the National Election Committee of Hungary keeps a record about whether an organization is a party or a civil organization. On the one hand, it is important to emphasize, that none of these organizations is driven by the aim to participate and get mandates in the national (parliamentary) elections. On the other hand, when a civil organization gains mandate in the local or regional elections, its representatives forced to play by the political rules of the game, it can not follow their own agenda, and its civic character become political (Kákai, 2004:184). In a sense, these NGOs can be considered as local parties but with very limited political goals. They activity is civil in every aspects, except the running for local political positions. One can understand the nature of these organizations through the examination of their political behaviour on the regional level. First of all, it is important to note that there are no typical regional parties in Hungary. The country is a unitarian state with homogenous society. Although there are minorities (especially the Roma society) who can characterized as regionally intact groups, they are politically divided by the logic of the right-left two-block system 2, and neither their ethnic, nor their regional attributes come to surface. Whereas the Hungarian county-system is one of the oldest mezzo-level institution of Europe (it was established in the 10 th century), the Hungarian citizens have no strong regional identity (Bőhm, 2002). The political-institutional framework of Hungary also diminishes the chance of the emergence of a strong regional party: before , the national (parliamentary) electoral system s candidate nomination mechanism hindered the organizations with restricted territorial representation, because the criteria to participate in the national compensatory (proportional list system) tier of the elections was the presence of the organizations in seven regions (from the total twenty) in the regional tier. Therefore only the parties with broad horizontal organization could be successful in the parliamentary elections, and the local/regional organizations could not become relevant actors of the national politics. Thus national parties, especially catch-all parties focused on organization building on the local levels. Beside this top-down logic of party development, one can observe bottom-up type tendencies too on the regional level: 2 The bipolarisation of the Hungarian politics is observed both on the elite and the mass level (Enyedi and Casal- Bértoa, 2011) with the Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz) dominating the right spectrum and the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) dominating the left. 3 The electoral reform in 2011 altered some attributes of the national electoral system, but the basic principles remained intact. 4

5 due the lack of strong regional parties, the regional elections in Hungary opened up the opportunity to participate in politics for the above mentioned local civil organizations. Because the elections for the municipal governments and the regional elections are scheduled at the same time, these NGOs often participate both in the local and regional competition. Thus the regional parties can be described as organizations rooted in the local communities with most of them fitting into the following two categories: - In the communities with greater population (usually in the bigger cities), the regional parties are local-patriot clubs, which want to represent the interests of their settlements on regional level. - The social basis of local actors in the smaller communities is much narrower, and they are unable to participate independently in the regional competition. For this reason they organize themselves into electoral alliances with each other this alliances can be formed based on common interests (alliances of pensioner clubs, agricultural organizations etc.) or they can be established just for the electoral advantages (in almost every regions is an alliance of mayors or an alliance of villages ). Either way, the bottom-up type organizations in the regional elections of Hungary are the local actors without strong regional identity. Their political aim is to represent the interests of their local community on the regional level, not to gain more power. One can observe the increasing dominance of national parties both on the local and regional levels. According to Bőhm, national politics suppresses the local politics by controlling the local issues, it tries to solve the problems from above and enforce its own interests (Bőhm, 2006:14-15). The party-relations of the national level mirror in the local governments and influence the policy positions of parties in the local issues. Thus the local party segments become Janus faced organizations, who try to represent the local interests and the policies of their party at the same time. Pálné (2008:241) claims that this changed in the 2000s as the party-politicians are identifying their roles as agents of the national party organizations 4. In the empirical chapter of this paper I investigate whether it is true, and then how this influences their work in the local governments. Nevertheless, from a macro perspective, one can identify the effects of the national party-politics on the local politics: while after the transition the 4 On the other hand, Pálné notes that instead of the party ideologies the governing/opposition positions are the dominant factors in the local governments decision-making: the governing forces emphasize modernization and effectiveness, while the actors in opposition stress the importance of autonomy regardless of their partypositions (Pálné, 2008:242). 5

6 parties tended to enter into an alliance (on local level) with their political opponents on the national level, there are no multicolored coalitions anymore in the Hungarian local governments. The process of the party-system s concentration (and the stabilization of the two-block system) can be tracked on the local level although it was somewhat slower than in the national politics (Wiener, 2010:118). At the same time, national parties are not strong equally in every municipality. It is a commonplace in the Hungarian local politics that the most dominant factor in the parties institutionalization is the population size (Soós, 2005; Soós and Kálmán 2002:75; Soós 2005). As I noted earlier, the local electoral system itself was created with the expectation to favour the local actors in the smaller communities. In fact, because there are much more small municipalities than large communities 5, one can argue that the local governments in Hungary are dominated by the independent representatives. Although most of the members in local councils are independent representatives (in 2006 their proportion is 64.6 percent Soós and Kákai, 2010), this does not mean that the national parties are not trying to reach the smaller communities: Horváth (1996:158) pointed out, that 1300 inhabitants 6 is the limit where one can identify the appearance of the political parties. The regional level clearly shows the signs of the increasing party dominance, which was reinforced by the changes of the regional electoral system in 1994 and 2010 both of them fundamentally restructured the nature of the regional politics. While in 1990 the representatives of the regional governments were selected by electors, who were delegated by the elected local governments, they introduced the direct election of the regional representatives in The system of delegation made it rather difficult for national parties to reach the regional level, since it was favourable for the local communities, as the regional governments became forums for the local issues. As a result, national parties showed no interest in the regional elections (Zongor 2000:18-19), but the new electoral system encouraged them to participate in the regional elections. This new system settled the relations of the regional level for a long period, which brought the growing presence of the national parties in the regional governments, who slowly forced out the civil organizations. However, 5 In 2012, only 167 local governments had more than inhabitants while there were 3009 municipalities with smaller population size (based on the data of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office). 6 The 1300 inhabitants limit appeared in local electoral rule (Act LXIV of 1990) became invalid in 2010 as a limit to determine the number of mandates. This limit came to an end when the new electoral rule (Act L of 2010) came into effect with 1000 and 5000 inhabitant limits instead of

7 an interesting phenomenon came into existence following the reform in 1994: the party-civic coalitions. After the post-communist transition, one can observe a dynamic development of the civil activity in Hungary (Pálné 2008:259). As the civil sphere emerged, the national parties tried (and succeeded) to establish connections to the civil organizations. This cooperation was favourable for both sides: the local organizations could get access easier to the mandates in the regional governments, while the parties got the brands of these organizations, which helped them to reach the local society easier. This connection between the parties and the civil organizations lasted until the regional elections in 2010, when the national parties ran alone for the mandates in all regions. One possible explanation for this can be given based on the political situation: while the parties on the left side became undesirable coalition-partners for the local organizations, the Fidesz could easily win the election without the help of its civil partners (and their demands for positions). Until 2010, the above mentioned compromise of locality and national politics was present in the regional electoral system too: there were two districts in each regions, one for the settlements under inhabitants and one for the settlements above this limit. In both districts was a proportional list formula (with Sainte-Laguë method and a four percent threshold) in use, and a given mandate number was determined based on the population of the territory. The electoral reform in 2010 brought only one major change to the local and regional level: they merged the two districts 7. This single regulation radically changed the regional politics. While the national parties with broad horizontal could easily adjust to the new system, the locally rooted civil organizations could not compete outside their district. In the Hungarian system, the organizations need to collect recommendations from the citizens to participate in the elections. The merge of the districts increased the necessary number of recommendations an average organization needs 6.7 times more recommendations to compete in the elections. Neither the clubs of local patriots in the cities above inhabitants, nor the alliances of the small communities are able to meet these requirements (Table 1). The electoral reform of 2010 can be interpreted as the end-point of a process, in which the national parties captured the regional level and forced out the civil organizations. In sum, from a macro perspective, one can observe the increasing dominance of the national parties both on local and regional levels. In the next chapters, I investigate how this picture 7 Also the number of achievable mandates was reduced and they switched to d Hondt method with a five percent threshold. 7

8 looks from below, how the emergence of party-politicians influences the daily operation of the Hungarian local governments. Table 1: Proportion of party and civil organization lists in the regional elections ( ) Parties 55,0% 55,6% 86,1% Civil organizations 45,0% 44,4% 13,9% Source: Dobos Elite interviews research method and case selection The data I used to this study were collected as part of a larger research project. The main aim of this interview project is to complete the mapping of the local elite relations 8, but it includes questions about the recent local (administrative) reforms in Hungary and about the state of the national and local politics in municipalities. During the research design, I intentionally chose a narrow scope for two reasons. First, there are only two members in the research team, which is lack of resources 9. There are more than 3000 municipalities in Hungary, and producing generalizable results would demand much more capacity. But the main reason is that this is an exploratory research. Although there were researches earlier with the local elite in the centre, these were focusing mostly on the socio-demographic characteristics or the compositions of the local councils (see Soós, Tóka and Wright, 2002; Bugovics, 2006). For this reason, first we need to collect information about the topic, then we can create hypotheses based on the collected data and broaden the scope of the research. Based on these considerations I chose the case study research method as a first step. This means that I did not want to focus on all the local governments in Hungary (to create general results), instead I tried to find the ideal number of cases I can handle even if it is resulted in information with restricted generalizability. Choosing counties as cases seemed to be obvious, and I preferred similar cases instead of different cases : I wanted choose counties with similar socioeconomic backgrounds following Geser s work (1999) I used the per capita GDP as a simple measure to choose two counties with the most similar GDP to the Hungarian average: 8 The subject of the author s PhD thesis is the dynamics of decision-making and the elite relations in the Hungarian local governments with special regard to the mayor, notary and deputy mayor position triangle. 9 The research was financed from EU funding through the Social Renewal Operational Program of the New Széchenyi Plan of Hungary (TÁMOP-4.2.2/B-10/ ). 8

9 Hajdú-Bihar and Veszprém 10. There are 299 municipalities in these counties, but 233 of them are under the 2000 inhabitants population size. This is important for two reasons. First, in the focus of the research are the local governments where national parties are appeared (and based on the literature it is a reasonable limit), second, from 2013, the mayor s offices of the municipalities under 2000 inhabitants are merged 11. After the restriction, I had to deal with 68 local governments, which is also over the research team s capacity but suitable to create a sample from this population. I applied stratified sampling and created stratums based on the municipality-size (Table 2). Finally I created a sample with 26 (13+13) elements, which more or less follows the original distribution of the population 12. Table 2: Distribution of local governments based on population size in the chosen counties Hajdú-Bihar Veszprém In the original project, I want to interview political and administrative actors of the local governments (namely mayors, representatives and notaries), but these side-project only requires interviews with the political actors. I want speak with every mayors of the chosen municipalities, but in the case of the representatives, I had to apply an another restriction, because of their great number (there are 5.3 council members in an average local government in Hungary). The basic principle in the selection of the interview subjects was the illustration of the dynamics of local politics: I chose from the representatives upon the governing force - opposition dichotomy, which has an important role in the operation of the council (Pálné 2008:242). Inside these groups I tried to create a colourful sample by choose possibly the most representatives from different parties or civic organizations. I composed my semi-structured questionnaire based on the Open Society Institute s Local Democracy and Local Government Survey from 2001 and applied both closed and openended questions. The closed questions help the subjects to get familiar with the topic and 10 I am aware that there are several more options and factors to choose cases, but as a matter of fact, the caseselection itself is not so important, its function is only to provide a field where the questionnaire and the basic assumptions can be tested. 11 This does not violate the autonomy of the municipalities since they can elect their own representatives, but rationalizes the costs of local administration. 12 The number of municipalities was determined based on the financial capacities of the project with this small number of cases, it is impossible to meet the requirements of a goodness-of-fit (chi-squared) test, but I tried to create a sample with the best possible incidence. 9

10 force them to give straight answers, while open-ended questions help them to think free about fairly general topics and bring the point of view which they think is most important to the surface (the exclusive usage of closed questions would result in the loss of these colourful and exciting momentums). Table 3: Distribution of interviews by population size and political positions Population size County Total Hajdú-Bihar Veszprém Total Position County Representative Mayor Total Hajdú-Bihar Veszprém Total The fieldwork is in progress, its first phase was took place between January and April of During this period we interviewed 30 mayors and representatives (Table 3). We only met independent or party-affiliated council members and mayors, and they are represented more or less in the same amount (Table 4). One can see, that the sample follows the trend, and there are no independent representatives in it above the inhabitants limit. Table 4: Distribution of interviews by political background Population size Total Independent Party-politician Total It is important to emphasize, the sample is not representative yet, as the project is still in progress. In the end of the fieldwork we want to have a sample which follows the distribution of the local governments with different population size in the chosen counties. Parties and politicians in the local government The questions of the interviews can be arranged around three topics: 10

11 - How the party affiliation influences the electoral success of the politicians? - Whether the representatives of national parties help or hinder the daily operation of the local council? - How the party affiliation influences the work of the representatives? First, we asked the representatives and mayors about which factors influence the success of politicians in the local elections. We asked them to arrange these factors 13 in a row. There are two popular choices to the first place: personal attributes (15 of 30 subjects took to the first place) and resident of the municipality (12 of 30). The party-affiliation was only mentioned 4 times as first, and it was ranked in the first half of the row only 11 times. Although the change of rankings in the municipalities with different population size shows an interesting dynamics: the personal attributes factor was ranked at first place only in the local governments below the inhabitants limit, and at the same time, party-affiliation becomes more dominant factor in the bigger municipalities while the average rank of this factor is 4.53 in the smaller municipalities, its rank is 2.0 in the local governments over the inhabitants limit. We also asked the party-politicians, why they ran for positions with a party support. They all stated that they were candidates of the given party because of its ideological position and they wanted to stay loyal to their organizations. At the same time, their answers also mirrored the position of their party: the representatives of the Fidesz argued that the party-affiliation increased their chances (although some representatives from smaller communities stated that their personal attributes helped the party s performance), while the council members of the MSZP noted that the logo of the party in their campaign brought only disadvantage 14. Nevertheless, they stayed loyal to the socialist party and wanted to be honest with the voters. Second, we asked the political actors about how the emergence of national political parties affected the local governments work. To gain comparable data, we asked them to answer with the help of a 7 graded scale, if the local politics is about local issues, and there is no place in it for parties (1) OR the national parties (as a link to the national politics) are important actors of the local politics (7). The independent council members (with an average 1.85 value) argued that the local politics should work without the parties, while the party- 13 Resident of the municipality; personal attributes; (non-political) position in the local community; member of the council/mayor earlier; support by a civil organization; support by a party. 14 The socialist party could not recover from its popularity loss since the autumn of 2006, when a democratic crisis developed after the socialist Prime Minister s speech leaked out. 11

12 affiliated representatives did not disapproved the emergence of the national parties however their opinion was not radical pro-party either (Table 5). Moreover two of them gave 1 and 2 as an answer. One possible explanation to this is that they were socialist representatives in municipalities where the Fidesz had a dominant majority in the local council. Table 5: Relation of national and local politics according to the political actors (1-7 scale) Mean N Standard Deviation Independent 1, ,80 Party-politician 4, ,70 Total 3, ,80 About the advantages/disadvantages of having party-politicians in the local councils, the subjects told that: in the one hand, the party-affiliated representatives can help their communities with their lobby activity and they can access to information easier from the national government; on the other hand party politics can easily suppress the local interests, and the ideology becomes the dominant factor in the decision-making, instead of the professionalism. According to some of the subjects, the advantages/disadvantages basically depend on whether the local government is the same coloured as the national government: if the municipality is lead by the governing forces, the party politics is useful, but if it is a council, captured by the opposition, it can be a curse. Finally, we examined how the party-affiliation influences the behaviour of the representatives in the local councils. We asked the subjects, according to their opinion, what is the main concern of the party-politicians in the local council: represent their party on local level, strengthen then connections between their party and the local society or solve local problems. There is a clear difference between the answers of the independent and party-affiliated representatives: while only 46 percent of the former subjects thought that the party-politicians are agents of their parties (in fact, most of the independent representatives argued that the party-politicians pay attention to the local interests), the 82 percent of latter subjects argued that the party-affiliated council members concentrate on the local issues. A point of interest is that the only party-politician who claimed that the party-affiliated representatives are partyagents was a prominent member of the MSZP, and a former mayor of the given municipality so he/she probably expressed his/her antipathy towards the local Fidesz leadership. The data and the answers to the open-ended questions suggest that the party-interest appears in the bigger municipalities, while the subjects in the smaller communities thought that the party-politicians are local actors in the first place, and party-agents only in the second place. 12

13 Although in few cases, the party-politicians vote based on their party s opinion on the given issue, instead of their personal belief. Moreover, some subjects mentioned that the ideological debates of the national level are mirrored in their local disputes on the occasion of the given local issue. From the answers, we could also identify something else in the background: even if a conflict seems to be rooted in the independent/party-affiliated (or left-right) antagonism, sometimes it hides a personal hostility between the council members. The source of this hostility can be different in every case: sometimes it is the heritage of the communist regime (for example, one political actor was a member of the former local communist elite and the other was oppressed by the regime), sometimes both of the subjects are prominent actors of the local community (e.g. entrepreneurs, intellectuals, religious leaders etc.), or sometimes the subjects are traditional opponents in the local mayoral elections regardless of their political background. Although these are exciting momentums of the local politics, the semi-structured questionnaire method is not suitable to give a precise picture about them. Conclusion First of all, I have to emphasize that the research has its limitations, and the results are not generalizable. The reasons for this: - these are the first results of an ongoing project, - the resources of the research team are limited and the scope of the research is narrow, - this is an exploratory research, its aim is to collect knowledge about the dynamics of the local politics, which (hopefully) will open up the opportunity to elaborate hypotheses and make possible further (deeper) research. However, the research can help to get a first impression of the local politics in Hungary from a micro perspective and to identify the main factors that are influencing it. Based on the available data, for the party-affiliated representatives and mayors seem to be rather members of congregations than agents of the national parties. Their role perception is local issue oriented, and even if they are members/candidates of parties, they try to represent the interests of the local community. The party-affiliation gives the local actors a common ideological background, which may influences somewhat their behaviour, but is not strong enough to overwrite their commitment to the local community. It is not surprising if partypoliticians try to act like protectors of the local society, but based on the interviews, even the 13

14 independent representatives think that the party-affiliation is not harmful to the council members work in the local governments. However, even this small and partial sample verified the observations of the macro perspective, namely that in the larger municipalities (where the parties become dominant actors), the wish of the national parties prevails more often, and the party-representatives are disciplined agents. Although the project is not suitable to complete the mapping of the local politics, it revealed some factors, which can be subjects of a subsequent research, such as the dynamics of governing majority and opposition, the interpersonal relations in the local councils, nonpolitical positions in the local community or lobby power of the party-politicians. References Bőhm, Antal (2002): Lokális és regionális identitás. [Local and regional identity] in: Comitatus, No. 4. pp Bőhm, Antal (2006): Az önkormányzati választások a parlamenti választások tükrében. [Local Elections in the Light of Parliamentary Elections] in Bőhm (ed.): A helyi hatalom és az önkormányzati választások Magyarországon , Budapest, MTA Politikai Tudományok Intézete Bugovics, Zoltán (2006): Elit-teli képviseló-testületek. [Elite-full Local Councils] in Bőhm (ed.): A helyi hatalom és az önkormányzati választások Magyarországon , Budapest, MTA Politikai Tudományok Intézete Clark, Peter B. and James Q. Wilson (1961): Incentive Systems: A Theory of Organization. in Administrative Science Quarterly, No. 6. pp Dobos, Gábor (2011): Elmozdulás középszinten: A 2010-es önkormányzati választási reform hatásai a megyei önkormányzatokra. [Shift at the Middle Level The Effects of the 2010 Local Electoral Reform on County Governments] in Politikatudományi Szemle, No. 4. pp Dobos, Gábor and Soós Gábor (2013): Against the Trend: Re-Centralization of the Local Government in Hungary. EGPA Annual Conference, September 2013, Edinburgh, Scotland UK Enyedi, Zsolt and Fernando Casal-Bértoa (2011): Patterns of Party Competition in Lewis - Markowski (eds): Europeanising Party Politics? Comparative Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe after Enlargement, Manchester, Manchester University Press Geser, Hans (1999): The Local Party as an Object of Interdisciplinary Comparative Study. Some Steps Toward Theoretical Integration. in Saiz - Geser (eds.): Local Parties in Political and Organizational Perspective, Oxford UK, Westview Press Kákai, László (2004): Önkormányzunk értetek, de nélkületek! [We Govern for You But Without You] Budapest, Századvég Kiadó Pálné Kovács, Ilona (2008): Helyi kormányzás Magyarországon. [Local Governance in Hungary] Pécs, Dialóg Campus Sartori, Giovanni (1976): Parties and Party Systems. A Framework for Analysis. Cambridge University Press 14

15 Soós, Gábor and Kálmán Judit (2002): Report on the State of Local Democracy in Hungary. in Soós Tóka Wright (eds.): The State of Local Democracy in Central Europe, Budapest, Open Society Institute Soós, Gábor. (2005): Local Party Institutionalization in Hungary. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Central European University Soós, Gábor (n. d.): Mitől függ a helyi politikai szervezetek választási jelentősége? [On What Depends the Electoral Importance of the Local Political Organizations?] Download date: 28 April 2007 Soós, Gábor and Kákai László (2010): Hungary: Remarkable Successes and Costly Failures: An Evaluation of Subnational Democracy. in Lidström et al. (eds): The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe, Oxford University Press Soós, Gábor, Tóka Gábor and Glen Wright (eds.) (2002): The State of Local Democracy in Central Europe, Budapest, Open Society Institute Swianiewicz, Pawel and Adam Mielczarek (2005): Parties and Political Culture in Central and Eastern European Local Governments. in Soós - Zentai (eds.): Faces of Local Democracy, Budapest, Open Society Institute Wiener, György (2010): Pártok az önkormányzati választásokon [Parties in the Local Elections ] in Kákai (ed.): 20 évesek az önkormányzatok. Születésnap, vagy halotti tor?, Pécs, Publikon Kiadó Zongor, Gábor (2000): A lebegő megyétől a politizáló megyéig. [From the Floating County to the Political County] in Comitatus, No. 9. pp