Introduction

Poland introduced the direct election of mayors relatively recently, in 2002. Nevertheless, there has already been four elections under that system. To use terminology introduced by Mouritzen and Svara (2002), Polish mayors are closest to the ‘strong leader’ form of leadership. Following the Heinelt and Hlepas (2006) typology, the Polish case represents a strong executive mayor model. However, as discussed in this chapter, there are some differences between the Polish case and classic features of the strong mayor form.

One of the peculiarities of the Polish case is that directly elected mayors appear at the municipal tier of local government only. They hold executive power in 2,478 municipalities. Both upper tiers of subnational government – 315 counties and 16 regions – have a collective form of leadership with an executive board appointed by county or regional councils respectively. The same collective model of leadership was in place at the municipal level during first three electoral cycles (1990 to 2002) after the restoration of a democratic local government system after the collapse of Communist Party rule in 1989.

Alongside developments in Poland, the introduction of directly elected mayors was a part of a wider, European trend. There are several academic contributions demonstrating that trend (for example, Larsen, 2002; Berg and Rao, 2005; Heinelt and Hlepas, 2006; Magre and Bertrana, 2007). However, it is less known that such a trend was particularly prevalent in post-communist Eastern Europe (see also Koprić, 2009a; Swianiewicz, 2014). The direct election of mayors was introduced almost immediately after the fall of Communism in several countries of the region, including Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Albania, Slovenia, Moldova and Armenia. Hungary followed shortly after in 1994, Macedonia in 1995, Poland in 2002 and Croatia in 2009. Georgia changed its system several times – trying directly elected mayors, then going back to indirect appointment through the council – and recent reforms of 2014 re-introduced the system of direct elections once again. In fact, the indirect election of local executives now exist in a minority of Eastern European countries, including the Czech Republic, Serbia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Change has been debated in some of these countries (see Jüptner, Chapter Twelve, this volume, for the Czech Republic). Montenegro (in two consequent elections starting from 2003) even experimented with direct mayoral elections, but then returned to the ‘old’ type of mayors elected by the local councils (Koprić, 2009b).