Types of Rural Residents in Central Poland in Terms of Their Local Participation: The Perspectives of the Local Authorities and the Inhabitants

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It would be better to separate the conclusion into a different section. That is, it is very convenient for the busy reader if the conclusions and recommendations are separated. Thanks

Author Response

Dear Madam/Sir,

We are very grateful for the insightful review of our article. In the revision of the manuscript, we took into account your suggestion to separate the conclusions and present them in a distinct section.

Thank you.

Reviewer 2 Report

I believe that this research explains the characteristics of political behavior in rural Poland very well. I also appreciate the author's efforts to see the low levels of participation from both directions. I do not have any issues with the overall design and the findings of this research. However, personally, it took me a longer time than it is supposed to to understand this research design and the methods. I hope the authors can be clearer and more simple in explaining the research design in the abstract, introduction, and methods parts. Instead, the authors can be more specific about why these two way approach is necessary in the context of rural Poland. One question I had about the survey was, why the authors didn't just ask the survey respondents why they did or did not participate in the local public affairs. It could have been more straightforward. Also, I thought that the benefit of comparing the interview results and the survey results was not clear in the discussion. 

Thanks for the opportunity to review this interesting study.   

Author Response

Dear Madam/Sir,

We are very grateful for the insightful review of our article. In the revision of the manuscript, we took into account your remarks and suggestions.

• We made a clearer explanation of the research design and the methods in the abstract, introduction and methodological part. We indicated that it is a triangulation approach and explained what it means in our research and why it is valuable.
• Answering the question of why the authors didn’t just ask the survey respondents why they did or did not participate in the local public affairs we indicated in the article that the conducted survey was a part of a project entitled “Models of management and the determinants of their functioning in rural communes” and served other research purposes. We used the part of the results that dealt with the issues discussed in the article, but not all aspects concerning public participation (among others the reasons for passivity and involvement) were included in the questionnaire. Therefore we do not dispose of the answers to the question about the reasons for the passivity of respondents. In the methodological part, we indicated that we disposed of the limited data because of doing the secondary analysis of data gathered in the research project serving other research purposes.
• We underlined the benefit of comparing the interview results and the survey results and we explained why using two types of research and data is important and valuable in understanding the problems of local participation in rural areas in Poland in the methodological part and in the “Conclusions”.

Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In principle, the article is strictly about citizens' participation in public life in a rural area of Poland, without any relation to sustainable development. There is only one question on the environment in the survey, but the commentary is minimal. The article would be more suitable for a political science or sociology journal.

The article is well thought out, but its results do not add much to what is already known in most European countries, especially those with less democratic traditions (Eastern European countries are mentioned, as well as Spain and Portugal, all of which were characterised by authoritarian regimes until not so many decades ago). In these countries, there is certainly a lack of training and democratic tradition.

Line 324 shows data from 2016 that should be updated, if possible, although they do not differ excessively from the current data.

In lines 350-354, it is indicated that “the variables in the quantitative study were originally constructed for other research purposes, so we did not have all the variables that refer directly to those indicated by mayors. In some cases, we inferred indirectly or extended the analysis to variables found in the literature but not mentioned by the mayors…”. These lines indicate an unscientific or poorly expressed procedure. This should be reviewed.

In section 4, it is suggested to separate the results, discussion and conclusions into different sections, or at least to separate the results on the one hand and the discussion and conclusions on the other.

Section 4.1.1. Passive residents represents a group of people who make up about two thirds of the surveyed population, which is very characteristic of most rural areas in Europe. It would be useful to focus more on this group, although it is largely explained in the article. It is also necessary to take into account passivity due to comfort, growing individualism, the hedonism of today's society, disappointment, lack of democratic education and values... On the other hand, citizens' forums are often uncomfortable for mayors, as they are vindictive and their proposals are not taken into account or cannot be implemented, which leads to rejection, disillusionment and passive attitudes. Other factors of passivity may be psychosocial, such as shyness, insecurity, lack of training and lack of understanding of a technical, complex and unintelligible bureaucracy.

In table 1, on forms of activity, all data are quite low. Even participation in elections is very low, as almost half do not vote. However, it reaches the highest percentage of all participation activities, as it is more attractive, both for those who vote out of civic engagement and for those who vote out of resentment or disappointment, although in this case the majority do not vote.

In this same table, in the section "Voluntary and unpaid work for the village or commune" (the second highest rated item), it has been characteristic in rural areas, it may be a collective custom for the benefit of all, as could happen with the item "Donating money to the commune or village", as a tradition.

Public opposition to local authorities" is logical and inherent to all positions, both in public institutions and in private companies. Discontent is always generated over time.

The Volunteer Fire Brigade or the Rural Housewives' Circle, if they receive any funding from the town, their situation is clearly dependent on the Town Council and they tend to collaborate.

The rest of the items in this table have percentages below 10% and are more technical, so many inhabitants do not have the possibility to participate.

Lines 598-600 indicate that "in Table 2 there are two extreme, opposite types (very active versus totally inactive)". It is true that the K-means clustering method confirms this, but while the inactive make up a very large set (62%), the latter is very small (less than 6%) and this is a problem throughout the paper, the disparity in the survey sample. And one might also ask to what extent this very small group is not linked to political parties and therefore interested.

Continuing with the same table 2, except among fully active people, who present clearly outstanding rates, in the other three groups of people there is no logical correlative relationship. It would be useful to analyse these groups by age, sex, education, activity, etc., as this would certainly introduce more explanatory elements.

Some of these variables are only mentioned in line 690, "socio-demographic (e.g. gender, age, education)", but are not explained. Alongside these, economic and occupational variables are missing. It then adds that these variables "were not commented on by the mayors". In this case, the researchers were able to include them in their surveys, given their importance, even if they were not commented on by the mayors.

As for the results in table 3, the lowest rating in all four groups is commune, possibly due to a lower sense of belonging. On the other hand, alienated and partially active individuals assign higher ratings to the country than to the village, perhaps because of local or personal disappointment. But the other two groups have very similar or equal ratings for village and country.

In table 4, the fully active group gives services (health, education, culture and transport) a lower score than the partially active group, which needs to be explained.

Author Response

Dear Madam/Sir,

We are very grateful for the insightful review of our article and all remarks and suggestions. We took all of them into account and made in the manuscript the expected corrections and additions. Here are responses to your remarks:

• We referred in “Conclusions” a little bit more to the concept of sustainable development and indicated the role of public participation in its social dimension. We see the importance of public participation in this context but because the manuscript is already quite long and the problem of sustainability was not in the field of our interest we didn’t consider it wider.
• We are aware that our study confirms the existing knowledge about the problems of public participation in "young democracy" countries and corresponds with the results of other studies (and we indicated it in the “Conclusions”). But we believe that the use of the triangulation approach and the analysis of the perspectives of two key actors in local policy (local government representatives and residents) allows us to better understand these problems and can be a valuable contribution to the literature on the subject.
• We updated the data presented in line 324.
• In reference to the following comment: In lines 350-354, it is indicated that “the variables in the quantitative study were originally constructed for other research purposes, so we did not have all the variables that refer directly to those indicated by mayors. In some cases, we inferred indirectly or extended the analysis to variables found in the literature but not mentioned by the mayors…”. These lines indicate an unscientific or poorly expressed procedure. This should be reviewed. – We fully agree that the quoted passage is not clear and logical, so we deleted it so as not to mislead the reader. In the methodological part, we indicated that we possessed limited data because of doing the secondary analysis of data gathered in the research project serving other research purposes.
• We separated results, discussion and
• We appreciate the interesting comments on reasons for the passivity. Although it was not the object of the study in quantitative research, we refer to those issues among others when we discuss the phenomenon of alienation in public life (lines 68-82 in the reviewed manuscript) and in part “Public and Social Participation in Polish Society” (lines 186-202 in the reviewed manuscript). In the “Conclusions”, we indicate this problem is worth including in further research.
• In reference to the following comment “The Volunteer Fire Brigade or the Rural Housewives' Circle, if they receive any funding from the town, their situation is clearly dependent on the Town Council and they tend to collaborate.” – We discussed it in the article in lines 583-586 in the reviewed manuscript.
• The explanation to the following remark Lines 598-600 indicates that "in Table 2 there are two extreme, opposite types (very active versus totally inactive)". It is true that the K-means clustering method confirms this, but while the inactive make up a very large set (62%), the latter is very small (less than 6%) and this is a problem throughout the paper, the disparity in the survey sample. And one might also ask to what extent this very small group is not linked to political parties and therefore interested. – We agree with it and we noticed this

disparity in the representation of residents in the two extreme types. This phenomenon is also confirmed by the results of qualitative research. The interviewed mayors clearly indicated that the active ones are very few, and the inactive ones are very many among residents.

• Regarding the comment about the lack of consideration of socio-demographic variables such as gender, age, level of education as well as economic and occupational variables, we would like to underline that we are aware of the importance of those variables but in our analysis conducted for the purpose of this article, we consciously did not include it. We made the assumption in advance that we do not analyze those explanatory variables that are not mentioned by mayors describing the different types of rural residents. It can be hypothesized that mayors do not perceive socio-demographic factors as significantly differentiating residents' activities. It seems to be a very interesting research problem to raise in another article. We added this explanation in “Conclusions”.
• Regarding the comment about the lowest interest of respondents in communal affairs in comparison with the affairs of the village and country (Review 3), there was an explanation of this phenomenon in the manuscript in lines 711-714 (in the reviewed manuscript) but we developed it a little bit and referred to historical conditions of this phenomenon.
• Taking into account the remark about the necessity of explaining why the fully active group gives services (health, education, culture and transport) a lower score than the partially active group, we added the such explanation in the manuscript: These are the spheres of public life on which the local community and local government seem to have the relatively greatest and direct influence. People belonging to this type of residents are more involved in local activities than others what may be the reason for their high rating of those areas for which they may feel responsible unlike the other aspects mentioned in the survey.

Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

With the modifications and clarifications made by the authors, the article can be considered publishable.