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The auxiliary units of Gdansk have become a permanent element of its structure. On the basis of the adopted legal measures, local authorities are not obliged to establish auxiliary units (but in Gdynia it is obligatory to appoint auxiliary units), but it follows from the grassroots activities of citizens. The mechanism of forming auxiliary units has become a means of inhabitants participating in municipal life. The unique functioning of the Gdańsk auxiliary units relies on their ongoing transformation, caused by multiple amendments of local laws. The above is a result of searching for the best solutions. Above all, multiple actions undertaken by the local government are focused on the stabilisation, as well as improvement of the functioning of auxiliary units.
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This paper seeks to present the changes in Poland’s territorial division and assess it at the local level (communes). The reference point is provided by the territorial reforms of other EU states, especially those with a three-tier structure, like in Poland. The basic thesis is that the territorial organization of public administration should change so as to keep up with political, economic, social and spatial processes, the latter bearing special importance for this. The paper concludes with recommendations for ways of changing local administrative structures, such as combining, or fusions of urban and rural communes.
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Since 2002, town mayors in Poland have been elected in direct elections every four years. In thirty towns with county rights the same persons were elected in the years 2002–2010. They are named ‘everlasting mayors’ (multi-term mayors, incumbents). In the 2014 local elections three of them resigned from the campaign for re-election, ten ‘everlasting mayors’ lost the elections and seventeen of them won the elections once again. Their successes provide the starting point for determining the position of political parties and nonpartisan committees on local political scenes. The assumption is made that the political position of parties is powerful if the ‘everlasting mayor’ is effective in trying to gain re-election while formally representing this party on the local political scene. And conversely – parties have a weaker political position on the local political scene when the incumbent prefers to lead a nonpartisan election committee in the rivalry for re-election (an electoral committee of voters, or an electoral com- mittee of a nongovernmental local organization). The nal conclusion of the analysis is the following: in the 2014 local elections in Poland most of the ‘multi-term mayors’ were re-elected as representatives of nonpartisan committees. Only in two cities (Gdańsk, Świnoujście) were mayors’ seats won by party political incumbents.
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The subject of the paper is delimitation of functional urban areas for the purposes of regional spatial planning. The main objective is scientific description of the author’s own method of delimitating functional urban areas with the use of functional linkages between cities and their surroundings. All the analyses have been conducted on the four types of linkages: commuting to work and to school, ownership linkages of companies, and migrations, and shown on the example of urban settlement network in the Łódź region.
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Legal status of the staff from local government, which is well defined, provides these public authorities efficient governance.Purpose of the present article is to study the normative acts and the literature concerning of the legal status of persons of local public authorities, for based on the analysis to make some proposals for improving the Moldovan law on the modernization of the activites of the staff from public local administration.
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This article extends the methodological and empirical scope of public administration research and applies two Bayesian-inspired computational research methods – unsupervised latent trait scaling and topic modeling. The article uses these methods to examine government budgeting in thirteen Western countries, utilizing budgetary legislation as the research material. The empirical research question is: How are legal system traditions present in the words of texts of legislation on government budgeting? According to the results, at one end of the latent trait scale we find overseas inheritors of Britain’s common law legal system, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and at the other end two representatives of civil law of the Napoleonic subtype, Italy and Spain. The other countries situate themselves in intermediate positions between the extremes. The topic modeling indicates three reasonably homogeneous groups of countries: the three overseas inheritors of common law and more weakly the United Kingdom, three countries representing the Napoleonic heritage, and, more weakly German-speaking and Nordic countries. In general, the article and its results emphasize the opportunities to extend Bayesian-inspired research in this research field.
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This article analyses currency boards from the perspective of new institutionalism, namely historical institutionalism. New institutionalism holds the view that institutions have independent, autonomous effects on the social world. Once established, institutions tend to become stronger over time due to path dependency. At the same time, the new institutionalist literature has been criticized for either ignoring or not being able to properly account for institutional change. This article pays attention to both self-enforcing and self-undermining effects generated by currency boards. Furthermore, the interaction of the currency board regime with other national institutions is analysed. After laying out the theoretical arguments, this article empirically assesses them with the analysis of three cases of currency board regimes in Estonia, Lithuania, and Argentina. One of the findings is that currency boards tend to become more popular over time. This tendency can be explained by several self-enforcing effects related to growing indebtedness in foreign currencies, currency boards’ role in ensuring macroeconomic stability as well as emerging ideational consensus supporting the regime. However, currency boards also unleash self-undermining tendencies, primarily related to the increasing general indebtedness and deteriorating competitiveness. The relationship of currency boards with the broader institutional set-up proved to be important. Unlike in Lithuania and especially in Estonia, the national institutional landscape in Argentina was unfavourable for the existence of the currency board regime. This was especially evident during the economic downturn of 1998–2002 when Argentina attempted to implement the internal adjustment strategy in order to safeguard the currency board. Nevertheless, Argentina’s inability to quickly adopt a major fiscal consolidation package eventually led to the demise of the currency board regime. In turn, this inability can be attributed to the lack of informal norms of fiscal prudence, decentralized nature of Argentina’s political institutions, and the organization of interest groups. The analysis provided in this article thus suggests that, despite important self-enforcing effects of currency boards, they are not sufficient to bring about the major transformation of a generally unfavourable national institutional landscape.
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In Poland, municipalities play a key role in pursuing the housing policy focused on satisfying the housing needs of the local community. The housing stock of a municipality was separated mainly to satisfy the housing needs of households which achieve a relatively low income and are not able to cope with this task alone. Therefore, a municipality should take all actions which promote the effective use of the existing housing stock. However, because of burdens arising from the transformation of the previous economic system, actions taken by municipalities in respect of housing are often not able to meet the needs of part of the local community. In the article the authors indicate the specificity of the problems in the field of housing policy of Krakow Municipality (KM) and the ensuing KM activity in the management of the owned housing stock in the view of the applicable law.
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The aim of this study is to investigate the history of the emergence, development and transformation of the tax administration processes in the context of the historical stages of the evolution of public administration in order to determine their compliance with the laws of functioning of the market, commodity-money relations and the development of economic systems. Based on analysis of the evolution of tax administration it has been substantiated that this process, which has its own objective logic, is part of the public administration, it is based on the fundamental principles and provisions of the state management of the economy, a systematic approach and analysis. The features of philosophical and economic perception of taxes and tax management in global economics have been disclosed. It has been proved that every economic system has its own peculiarities of tax management process, which in turn are determined by certain factors caused by the operation of the laws of the market, commodity-money relations and development of economic systems.The expediency of using historical experience in the process of improvement of tax administration, as one of the most important elements in the system of public administration, has been substantiated.
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The huge challenges posed by climate change can only be dealt with if a consistent and comprehensive policy and research approach is adopted at national, European and global levels. The overall aim must be one of mitigating and adapting to climate change through the adoption of decarbonization and resilience measures. This applies in particular to cities which have great leverage in achieving this goal. A wide range of research programs have already been put in place to transform our cities into sustainable, energy efficient and livable Smart Cities. The solutions developed include innovative technologies for renewable resources, decision support tools that provide objective information and guidance for policy makers, sophisticated modeling and simulation tools for stronger citizen participation in urban planning processes and new research domains such as living labs and urban transformation. In view of the challenges that lie ahead, collaboration between science, industry and urban stakeholders needs to be further consolidated and expanded to foster European research and innovation for Smart Cities.
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The experience of reading the reports produced by various departments of the Lodz town government in the times of the Nazi occupation gives us a unique opportunity to become acquainted with the functioning of the fascist bureaucracy. There is much we can learn there about the work of the office in question and the lives of its officials in a broader context of the effectiveness of their activity. It transpires, for example, very clearly that no legal equality existed between the Germans and the Jews. This is corroborated by the fact that, in the rare cases of municipal claims against the Jews in the Lodz ghetto, those claims were upheld and enforced very meticulously.
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The aim of the research was to show the features of Lithuanian mayors political career and find out whether the introduction of direct election system influenced the composition of Lithuanian mayors with respect to their political careers. The profiles of mayors elected in 2011 and 2015 were analyzed. The analysis was based on empirical data – the mayors’ resumes from official website of Central Electoral Committee of Lithuania and survey of Mayors. The research has shown that after the introduction of direct election of mayors, more new personalities and more nonpartisan candidates were elected. In comparison to the newly elected mayors in 2011, to the ones elected in 2015, it can be seen that the number of elected candidates with no prior political experience has doubled. On the other hand, a large number of newly elected mayors have had political experience as council members, other mayors have had various positions not only as council members, but also as vice mayors or other municipal positions. A small number of mayors has had experience of working in Parliament. A general trend was observed: mayors reach their position through political parties and mostly from the public sector. The introduction of direct elections has had a minor influence with respect to political experience of council work in case of the general number mayors. On the other hand, the influence is higher with respect to the newly elected mayors. The article also points out that the experience of Lithuanian mayors in pre-mayoral career is similar to the European average. On average, they have been council members for 5,5 years before the first term as a mayor. Another aspect of political career under investigation was seniority. On average, in Lithuania, the same person holds mayor’s position for 5 years, which is also rather similar to averages of other European mayors.
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There are two major forms of the democratical excercise of powers: the direct and the indirect democracy. The entire system of the separation of powers can be can ce classified within the scope of the indirect excercise of democracy, although in a broad sense methods of the direct excercise of the democracy can make up such division of powers, which can be used as a bance against the machine of power structures, which relys too much on the binary code of the government -opposition, and distances itself too far from the people. Here I would like refer to the legal instrument of the referendums, within which, it is possible to talk about a significant direct excercise of democracy. The American theory, the ’checks and balances’ shall be equal to the concept mentioned above. Usually that concept named as a synonym of it, nevertheless according to some opinions that is considered to be different from it. The demand of mentioning the constitutional power as a separate factor can be arised after the question of creating the classic branches of power is transferred from theory to practice. Namely when not just scientific foundation but social legitimacy inevitably arise. Its importance is justified that the whole framework of the system of the exercise of power is specified by the constitution, which can’t be only the ultimatum of the ruler or a particular social group, layer, class in a constitutional democracy.
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The leading aim of this paper is to portray the constitutional institution of compensation liability for unlawful acts of public authorities in Polish law related to the development of general principle concerning democratic rule of law. Compensation for damages brought upon the citizens by civil servants constitutes a basic pillar of contemporary democratic state, because it guarantees acting by public authorities in compliances with law and deepen trustfulness. It is also said that the state of the above–mentioned institution indicates the development of democracy.
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The article studies the constitutional framework of organization of public authorities in the subjects of the Russian Federation. The work shows the significance of the principles that define the formation and activities of public authorities in the federal subjects of Russia.
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The article presents the results of representative surveys carried out among the leaders of Nizhnekamsk non-profit organizations (NPOs) from spring to autumn 2013. The author shows the main characteristics of NPOs: small number, local nature, low number of employees, intrasectoral cooperation, close interaction with municipal authorities, limited activity (due to the policy of paternalism), and dissatisfaction with the state policy in the area of the third sector. The author concludes that the development of the Nizhnekamsk non-profit sector corresponds to the all-Russian trends.
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This article presents and analyses the postconflict peacebuilding actions in Kosovo. It aims to bring a picture of external and internal actors involved in such a process from the end of the conflict up to date. The article challenges peace process in Kosovo through the issues emerging in the Society due to the unsettled status enduring as of Security Council Resolution 1244. It is structured into three sections. The first section analyses the postconflict peacebuilding and statebuilding actions undertaken by external and internal actors right after the conflict. The second section deals with the issue of transitional justice as a key element on peacebuilding and how it was addressed. Whereas the third section analyses the current situation of the population with the issues inherited from the conflict and others emerged due to undefined actions of external and internal actors.
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