Local Government Performance in Social Policy

Abstract

The social policy areas that we chose to investigate are families in crisis and childcare services. The social transitions in post-communist settings resulted in a chain reaction of unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, family breakdowns or abuse, and abandoned or neglected children. These problems are not limited to, but are much more widespread in the smaller localities that we are investigating, considering that many local economies remained unreformed and maintain higher rates of unemployment than in the booming capital cities or regional centres. Moreover, the related issues of problem families and neglected or abandoned children are pertinent even in the more prosperous towns, such as the western Hungarian town of Sopron. Here, for example, one observed what may be called the ‘rich town social syndrome’ with the booming local economy resulting in soaring rents, which push the less well off or unskilled labourers out of the previously subsidised housing into homelessness, substance abuse and further down the social ladder.