This article deals with the efficiency of the usual municipal expenditures on environmental protection and suggests a methodology for assessing this efficiency. Firstly, the paper analyses the concept of efficiency from the view of individual rationality. The authors consider efficiency in the sense of 3E methodology -economy, efficiency and effectiveness and the methodology of sustainable development -the social, environmental and economic parts of sustainable development, as well as the role of those who make decisions in environmental politics. A proposal of a methodological procedure for assessing municipal expenditure efficiency is presented next. It uses multi-criteria assessment, where a dominant criterion of performance is C/E. This procedure is applied to a file of environmental expenditure data from the representative sample of municipalities in selected areas of environmental protection that were used in a project of the Ministry of Environment of the Czech Republic SP/4i1/54/08 "Analysis of municipal budgets efficiency in relation to the environmental protection". The data comes from selected municipality budgets and are analyzed for the time range of 2001-2008, because the data has been in electronic form since then.

Property tax autonomy of the Czech municipalities is quite narrow and to great extent unused. Perceived political costs of its usage are high and only 8% of municipalities utilized the possibility to increase the tax rates through so called local coefficient. Using the binary logit model and a full sample and two subsamples of Czech municipalities in 2014 the existence of tax mimicking is confirmed regardless the subsample of municipalities considered or the definition of neighbors applied. The likelihood to increase the local coefficient is to some extent influenced by the composition of the municipal council and local demographic, geographic and fiscal situation. However, the overall capacity of the model to indicate municipalities which apply local coefficient is low and suggests that there are many other or different situations or factors which result in application of local coefficient.

Th ough participatory budgeting (PB) is oft en discussed as a tool to bolster the level of civic participation and the quality of democracy, empirical research on the subject off ers ambiguous results. In the Czech Republic, PB was introduced 5 years ago, and the number of implemented PBs has since increased substantially. Th e purpose of this article is to evaluate whether the use of PB is associated with higher voter turnout in municipal and parliamentary elections. Voter turnout in Czech municipalities that implemented PB is analyzed and compared with the control group of municipalities without PB. Considered by type of election, we found that the impact of PB use on voter turnout is higher for local elections than it is for national elections, which is in line with our assumptions. However, our results were signifi cant for Prague districts only. Participatory budgeting could increase voter turnout in local election, but there are other factors that must be considered.

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The paper deals with the historical development of local self-government in the context of the development of the public administration as a whole during the First Czechoslovak Republic. It presents historical roots of the public administration in the former imperial Austria-Hungary, which was different from other European countries with its complex bureaucratic structures. Certain elements of the complex political and administrative developments during the early 20th century can be seen even one hundred years later. It is becoming apparent that history repeats itself in a number of issues and that it is unforgivable not to learn lessons both from the mistakes and the successful solutions of the past.