After 40 years of highly centralised government throughout the communist period, “the reconstruction of local government became one of the first and most important pillars of the 1989 political transformation in Poland” (Kulesza and Szescilo, 2012: 485). The first municipal local (gmina) elections took place in the 1990s. Further decentralisation occurred in 1998 when two additional levels of subnational government were created at the regional (voivodeship) and county/district (powiat) levels.