Local Self-Government as the Institutional Foundation of Democratic Resilience: A Systemic-Institutional Approach

Abstract This article argues that young democracies, especially post-socialist ones, often establish formal democratic institutions while remaining weak in public accountability and vulnerable to democratic backsliding. This fragility is reflected in the underdevelopment of local self-government as a two-tier architecture of public governance. Drawing on institutionalism and systems theory, the article treats municipalities as autonomous local subsystems supported by feedback from taxpayers and residents, while the second tier is understood as a co-ordinating and equalising meso-level. An analysis of countries with open access orders shows that developed democracies usually possess a fiscally supported local tier that creates conditions for taxpayer-user feedback. The article argues that weak institutionalisation of representative bodies may facilitate the personalisation of power and the capture of local institutions by local elites. Thus, democratic resilience requires not only national institutions, but also robustly institutionalised autonomous local subsystems capable of identifying and correcting everyday public problems in a timely manner.