The dissertation clarifies historiographical, theoretical, methodological, practical and empirical attributes of coverage, structuring, systematization and comparison of evolution, factors, parameters, procedures, regulations, components and consequences of historical and current stages of the formation and development of local government systems and bodies, local socio-political process and administrative-territorial structure in the conditions of primary centralization and later decentralization of power in the Republic of Poland and Ukraine. This is due to the solution of key research tasks, in particular: assessment of the historiography of local government and local development in the context of decentralization of power in Poland and Ukraine, including at the background of the peculiarities of the formation and progress of these issues in the regions of East-Central and Eastern Europe; systematization of categorical, conceptual and generally theoretical and methodological principles and approaches to the study of the essence, types, models, structure, legitimacy, development, powers, functionality and responsibility of local government in the conditions of democratization and variety of forms, types and effects of decentralization of power; elucidation and comparison of features and consequences of decentralization of power within the processes of formation, progress and current state of development of the principles of formation and authorization of the system and bodies of local government and the components of administrative-territorial organization in Poland and their impact on Ukraine; structuring the manifestations, practices and indicators of the efficiency of transfer of state powers «from top to bottom» as a result of decentralization of power and their impact on the formation and functioning of local government at the communities’ level in Poland and Ukraine as well as on further increase of the effectiveness of decentralization of power, local government and local politics in Ukraine.
The dissertation proved that the more successful, democratized and integrated to the European Union is a country or a part of the world, the more developed and borrowed in it is the theory and practice of local government in the context of decentralization of power, thus providing geographical and geopolitical (but gradually weakened and equalizing one) dominance of the conditional «West» over the conditional «East» (including Western Europe over East-Central and Eastern Europe and East-Central Europe over Eastern Europe). That is why it is argued that local government and decentralization of power are filters of local interests, mobilizers and promoters of institutional, socio-economic and democratic reforms and values, etc.
Based on this, it was demonstrated that some communities are characterized by low stability and high institutional efficiency, and some communities – on the contrary, although the situation with stability is better on average than the situation with the efficiency of communities in performing basic tasks. There is a partial relationship between the institutional effectiveness of local government in communities and the stable performance of their functions and tasks. Thus, the success of local government reforms and decentralization of power in Poland, unlike in Ukraine, is due to their rapid initiation and implementation immediately after the collapse of the regime of «real socialism», because given these the influential function of communities was almost automatically established and subsequently implemented, even despite the attempts to recentralize power. In addition, Poland at the community level (but not at the higher levels) is traditionally (actually and formally) characterized by the personalization of politics through depoliticization, departization and technocratization, and Ukraine – by the personalization of politics through politicization, partization and regionalization, as a result the level of trust in governance at the community level is higher in the first country than in the second.
Although it was argued that there is no the best, universal and unified model of decentralization of power, but instead specific models of local government and development should be established taking into account the peculiarities of social, economic, political, cultural, historical and even geographical development, but through the prism of their coverage by the means of political, administrative and fiscal decentralization of power and in the framework of political and institutional design and the conditions of socio-economic development. Since decentralization of power changes the power relations between locals, bodies of local governments, service providers and higher/central levels of governance, and therefore dynamically rather than statically establishes new or modifies the existing rules of the political game and inter-institutional relations.
