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party-government team to advise on Poland's socioeconomic development through the year 2000 and beyond; a party-state commission on education and youth; a mixed study group on the social and economic role of local government; and numerous "task forces" of mixed composition analyzing specific areas such as foreign trade, internal security, economic planning, scientific-technological research, management, culture, transportation, and the social security system. Gierek's pragmatic and measured implementation of reforms in all these fields dictates a flexible institutional approach, which continues to be characterized by the creation of government bodies for specific purposes, dissolving them when their task is accomplished or if they prove to be ineffective, and the retention of only those features of the new apparatus that have withstood the test of time.
c. Local government
Poland theoretically has independent local self-government, operating through a hierarchy of popularly elected local government bodies called people's councils, with the Council of State at its apex. In practice, the entire system has been highly centralized and subject to executive discretion by the Council of Ministers and to varying degrees of party "guidance" at every level.
The people's councils are elected every 4 years in direct elections that coincide in time with national (parliamentary) elections. Each council has an executive body and several functional commissions - their number as well as functions may vary depending largely on the level of local government concerned and on the extent and character of the council's jurisdiction. These commissions execute central ministerial directives in the areas of public order, criminal administration, health and social welfare, education, issuance of identity cards, housing and commercial policy, fire prevention, and similar areas of local competence. In addition, they administer all economic enterprises of local (in contrast to national) importance, local retail trade, and the implementation of agricultural policy.
Although the commissions of the people's councils are thus theoretically charged with the implementation of a wide range of local administration, many of their functions, especially in the areas of economic and social policy and in the administration of public order, have been exercised jointly with, i.e., essentially under the control of, the local representatives of other central government agencies such as the trade unions and the police apparatus. Moreover, despite the theoretical competence of the commissions, it is the councils' executive bodies, the presidiums headed by a chairman and under the ultimate control of the Council of Ministers, which have the operative agencies of local and regional administration. Although Communist party members are in a minority within the total number of councilors, party members and other "reliable" personnel tend to make up the majority on each council's presidium.
There are people's councils at every level of the administrative divisions and subdivisions of Poland. The level immediately below that of the central government is that of the province (wojewodztwo), of which there are 22 including five cities - Warsaw, Lodz,[1] Poznan, Krakow, and Wroclaw (Breslau) - which have separate status but are at the same time capitals of the provinces in which they are located. IN 1972, there were below the provincial level 391 district (powiat, i.e., county) councils, 849 city and borough (municipal) councils, and 4,313 gromada (village and settlement) councils, the last category representing the lowest level of local government.
It is the category of the basic unit of rural government that is being reorganized and reformed by the Gierek regime. The reform, effective 1 January 1973, seeks by merger to reduce the number of rural councils, reorganized local lines of authority, and create larger, more self-sufficient, and potentially more independent economic and social micro-regions. This is probably the most ambitious organizational measure yet taken by the new leadership.
The reform is essentially a reversion on the rural level to the local government structure of the immediate postwar years, which did not differ greatly from the traditional structure used in Poland between the two world wars, when a single-man executive called a voivode was in charge of a province, a starosta of a district, and a wojt of a parish. At each level there were elected councils with advisory powers. After World War II the Communist regime retained the outer forms of this traditional system but altered the real character of the agencies involved. Lacking adequate administrative staffing, the party preferred to leave administrative posts in the hands of professionals who were often hostile to the political system and to control their activities by using party members on the corresponding levels of the people's councils. This dual approach ultimately led to an undermining of the prestige of authority in the rural areas and to be party careerists controlling affairs, often against the interests of the party as a whole.
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- ↑ For diacritics on place names see the list of names on the apron of the Summary Map in the Country Profile Chapter and the map itself.
