A meglepetések éjszakája – A 2017-es szlovákiai megyei választások

Author(s): Szabolcs Mózes / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 4/2017

The aim of this paper is to introduce and analyse the results of the 2017 county-level local elections. The election produced many surprises. For example, the participation of voters was much higher than expected, the winner of the elections became the right-wing opposition, the Smer party lost many important positions, and the radical Marian Kotleba was not able to hold his post as the head of the self-governing Banská Bystrica region. The election reflected the ongoing tendency of strengthening independent candidates. The struggle between Hungarian political forces was won by the Party of the Hungarian Community (MKP-SMK), which earned almost four times more seats than the Most- Híd party. However, the Hungarian candidates were mainly successful in the regions with Hungarian ethnic majorities, and in the ethnically mixed regions the level of Hungarian political representation decreased.

A megyei választások kérdése és az 1843. évi követutasítások

Author(s): Ádám Dombovári / Language(s): Hungarian / Publication Year: 0

A nagy menetelés a kispadig – A 2020-as szlovákiai választás magyar vonatkozásairól

Author(s): Gábor Harrach / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2020

A New Populist Divide? Correspondences of Supply and Demand in the 2015 Polish Parliamentary Elections

Author(s): Ben Stanley / Language(s): English / Issue: 01/2019

This paper uses a new set of questions to analyse the impact of populist attitudes on party preferences and voting behaviour in the 2015 Polish parliamentary elections. At these elections, voters faced a choice between two broad blocs: parties that accepted the “liberal-orthodox” model of post-communist politics, and those that rejected this model and the political elites associated with its implementation. I find that there is a coherent set of populist attitudes among the Polish electorate, and that it correlates with economic and cultural attitudes in ways consistent with the supply-side divide between liberal and anti-liberal parties. Analysis of the individual and combined impact of these attitudes on voting behaviour reveals that populism plays a significant role both in structuring the sentiments of voters towards particular kinds of political parties and in determining how they cast their vote.

A parlamenti választási rendszerek nemzeti kisebbségi vonatkozásai a Nyugat-Balkánon – harminc éve a demokrácia árnyékában?

Author(s): László Horváth / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2020

As of the 1990s not only Central and Eastern Europe, but also the countries of the Western Balkans were transformed from one party to multi-party democracies. Besides the political representation of the majority, the national minorities have also demonstrated political ambition and have sought visibility. At the same time the rights of national minorities, their participation in political life – especially due to the tragic events in the Balkans – have gradually shifted to the centre of attention from a marginal position. Among alternative solutions there are various methods for separate parliamentary representation of national minorities. These solutions have been put into practice in many of the above mentioned states. The aim of this paper is to review these alternative solutions of the past 30 years and the difficulties they have faced. The objective has been to provide a comprehensive exposition of the evolution of parliamentary representation of national minorities in the Western Balkans.

A particular electoral system

Author(s): Alexandru Radu / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: 201-202/2019

The parliamentary elections of November 2-9, 1919, were the first collective experience of democracy in the Romanian political space. It was based, after more than five decades of census electoral practice, on the mechanism of universal (male) voting, enshrined in the Constitution in 1917. The use of proportional representation for the election of 60% of deputies was a real electoral revolution. In November 1919, the first election in the history of the country was organized, attended by the inhabitants of all Romanian provinces. The texts below analyze the electoral mechanisms and procedures used, as well as their political effects.

A Peculiar Interpretation of the Constitutional Principle of “One Person, One Vote” in Poland: Voter (In)equality in the Elections to 1,200 Local Legislatures

Author(s): Michał Pierzgalski,Paweł Stępień / Language(s): English / Issue: 04/2017

The adoption of new redistricting plans for the 2014 elections to local legislatures in Poland resulted in significant violations of the “one person, one vote” principle. This article shows the results of the first comparative study measuring within-country variation of voter inequality, using data from the 2014 Polish local elections to 1,200 commune or municipal councils, that is, local legislatures. Voter inequality is usually examined at the country or state level, while studies that take into account withincountry variation of malapportionment, using local election data, are neglected by scholars. To put our research in a broader context, we compared levels of malapportionment in Poland with internationally recognized standards (contained, e.g., in the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters issued by the Venice Commission) as to the acceptable levels of deviations from the “ideal” population, and also with empirical findings on the levels of voter inequality in other countries. We argue that the significant vote–value disparities in elections to commune councils in Poland result primarily from the disadvantages of the Polish 2011 Election Code. When it comes to local legislature elections in the vast majority of communes that are not the so-called countystatus towns, the legally permitted deviation from the ideal district population ranges from +50 percent to −50 percent. Even considering the standards of redistricting for local elections, the interpretation of the “one person, one vote” principle is rather peculiar in Polish commune elections.

A politikai rendszerintegrációt befolyásoló tényezők

Author(s): Andrea Szabó,Dániel Oross / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 3/2016

In this paper we wish to offer an image of the operation of the integrative mechanisms of the Hungarian society. Specifically we concentrate on systems integration, in other words to those political processes and interactions that reproduce the mechanisms of coexistence within the society. Systems integration is approached from the dimension of action (Kiss 2015a). Testing three hypotheses on the data base of the OTKA-research entitled ’Processes of Integration and Disintegration in the Hungarian Society’ we present which explanatory factors influence intentions of choice and the traditional or direct democratic forms of political activity. We separately dwell upon relations between cohort generations and participation, life events and participation as well as clients and participation.

A prayer for peace in Belarus

Author(s): Iris Kempe / Language(s): English / Issue: 01+02 (45)/2021

Since the elections in Belarus on August 9th 2020, both the image of this country once portrayed as “the most severe dictatorship in Europe” and its people have significantly changed. International audiences can now see that every weekend – sometimes even on weekdays – large crowds come to the streets of Belarusian cities to express their discontent with the forged election results. The people have been demanding freedom and fair elections, thereby showing their attachment to common European values. Citizens in Belarus have finally awakened and are working towards change.

A Spanish “yes, we can!” against the two-party system

Author(s): Guillermo López García / Language(s): English / Issue: 13/2016

This article develops an analysis of the internal functioning of the Spanish party Podemos and its structural make-up. The used methodology consists of: 1) a descriptive analysis of the development of Podemos, based on the available information in the media; 2) an analysis centered on the presence of Podemos in social networks and the mainstream media, in addition to electoral results and polls. The analysis attempts to determine the following: the party’s decision- making process, along with the type of relationships established between leaders and supporters; to what extent the Internet is used as a primary tool for organization, mobilization and political propaganda; and the extent of the clash or harmony within the interparty’s dynamics: on one hand, the bottom-up structure of the citizen assemblies and, on the other, the top-down structure inferred from Pablo Iglesias’s hyper-leadership and the media presence of the party’s principal leaders.

A spatial perspective on political group formation in Turkey after the 1971 coup: The Kurdistan Workers Party of Turkey (PKK)

Author(s): Joost Jongerden / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2017

The five years preceding the 1978 founding congress of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partîya Karkêren Kurdistan, PKK) are referred to by its members as the party’s “existential period”. In the PKK’s “existential period” public spaces, such as university dormitories and canteens and student associations played an important role as meeting places, yet political formation occurred mainly in private spaces, especially private apartments and houses. This article considers this early history of the PKK from a spatial perspective. The main question addressed is how the Kurdistan Revolutionaries, as the group was known before its formal establishment, sustained itself spatially at a time when political life had been paralysed as a result of martial law and became subject to securitisation politics. Data for this article has been collected by means of interviews and the study of (auto)biographical texts.

A stratégiai szavazás arcai

Author(s): Ádám Máté Harkányi / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2018

Strategic voting is one of the concepts of political science which is widely used by the media, and has changed significantly over the past two decades. Research into strategic voting – with the increase in the number of proportional and mixed electoral systems through democratization processes and numerous electoral reforms – is less and less focused on the plurality-majority systems. Of course, growing researcher interest was associated with expanding the concept and exploring the wider range of institutional incentives and voter motivations behind it. We have come to know many new faces of strategic voting. The aim of this study is to present the conceptual changes, the relevance of some of the features of the electoral systems, and the various possible motives for strategic voting, in other words, the different faces of strategic voting. Due to the growing domestic interest in this topic, it is important to review the context of ticket splitting and strategic voting, as well as to present some of the most important findings of previous research.

A Szentszék és a magyar választófejedelemség gondolata a 17. század végén

Author(s): Mihalik Béla Vilmos / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 03/2016

The anti-Ottoman war of reconquista conducted in Hungary (1683–1699) was also supported by the Protestant Principality of Brunswick-Lüneburg, several members of the princely family personally participating to the war. In return for the military support, Duke Ernst-August wanted to gain an electoral status, and his efforts were backed by the Prince-Elector of Brandenburg. Negotiations already started in 1689, when archduke Joseph, the son of emperor and Hungarian king Leopold I, was elected King of the Romans. The Catholic Electors followed the events with worry, especially from 1691, when the discussions between Ernst-August and the Viennese court started in earnest. The elector treaty (Kurtraktat), which was concluded on 22 March 1692, elicited more considerable resistance from the Catholic princes of the Holy Roman Empire, who feared both that the equilibrium between the confessions would be disrupted, and that the balance of power between the electoral and the princely colleges would be changed. The Catholic princes, and especially the bishoprics in the vicinity of Brunswick-Lüneburg, expected support from the Holy See. But the Holy See was unwilling to interfere with internal disputes within the Empire, especially with regard to the broader European situation, overshadowed by the Nine Years’ War. Yet it did maintain contacts with the Catholic imperial estates through the nuncios of Cologne and Vienna. It may have been from there that the idea of creating a new Catholic Electorate emerged. The idea, relating concretely to the Kingdom of Hungary, was first raised in the spring of 1692. A year later, in April 1693, Viennese nuncio Sebastiano Antonio Tanara came forward with this possibility once again. Parallelly, however, the restoration of rights carried by the Bohemian electoral vote was also proposed. One and a half decades later, during the War of the Spanish Succession, this latter solution was in fact adopted, although in a different political situation. But the very idea of a Hungarian Electorate shows that, after securing the hereditary succession of the Habsburg dynasty in Hungary (1687), the idea of connecting the Kingdom of Hungary to the Holy Roman Empire by elevating it to electoral status was also considered in Viennese court circles. The Hungarian estates were too powerful for such a plan to have real chances to succeed, however. Consequently, it remained no more than an interesting episode in the emergence of the Electorate of Hanover.

A Vision of the European Union: A Study of Media Coverage of Polish Election Campaigns for the 2019 European Parliament Elections

Author(s): Ewa Stasiak-Jazukiewicz,Marta JAS-KOZIARKIEWICZ,Renata Mienkowska-Norkienė / Language(s): English / Issue: 2(98)/2020

The 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections coincided with the discussions about the need to change the European integration model. These discussions were forced by the refugee crisis and Brexit. In this article, the authors investigate the media representation of programs proposed by Polish political parties in the campaign for EP 2019 elections. The purpose is to determine how the media reported on these programs (media agenda). The research question required the supplementation of the study with an analysis of the political parties’ programs. The research model is based on an agenda-setting theory. The empirical section presents the results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of both media and political agendas, confirming the discrepancy between them.

A War by Other Means? Conceptions of Democracy and the Election Law in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Author(s): Ivan Pepić / Language(s): English / Issue: 15/2018

This article discusses the political effects of two different conceptions of democracy in ethnically deeply divided societies. It considers the conflicts with clear historical roots by analysing the case of the Election Law of Bosnia and Herzegovina which involves two irreconcilable ideas of democracy expressed by the political elites of two communities, the Bosniaks and the Croats. The first part explains the conflict between Bosniak and Croat political elites, which have respectively, been trying to impose either the majoritarian or the consociational system since the 1990s. The second part discusses the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina on electoral rules. It is argued that the imposition of integrationist-like rules and the suspension of consociational arrangements in the Election Law has increased divisions between the two ethnic communities. Finally, the article analyses the proposed amendments to election rules submitted to both state and entity parliaments, which confirm the existence of clearly irreconcilable visions of democracy within the Bosniak-Croat Federation.

Abnormal Becoming Normal; Decolonizing South African Electorates

Author(s): Toyin Cotties Adetiba / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2018

There is a common electoral sentiment amongst the majority black South Africans that voting for the right [ANC] political party is a vote for total freedom while restraining a return of the proverbial Egyptian experience. The concept of decolonizing the mind is a complex phenomenon. Decolonization is a term used when referring to the undoing of oppression/colonialism, where a nation had established and maintained its domination over dependent territories. Colonialism is therefore a model of imperialism, understood as the domination involving the oppression of one people by another. South Africa had a vibrant liberation organisations championed by the ANC as a means to politically decolonize South African electorates. However, the minds of the people that have hitherto been politically colonized seem to have been moulded by the political elites to accept and propagate the ideas of the liberation organisations. Thus eroding the honour of having a free mind to choose which political idea is the most appropriate. Using public opinion measures to evaluate the relationship between different measures of direct political participation and why the electorates vote for a particular party,this study explains the prevailing existence of politically colonized South Africa society from the standpoint of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work; “Decolonizing the mind; the politics of language in African literature.” This study discovered that the ballot from the standpoint of South African electorates does not promote de-colonialism, but rather prevent a return to the old proverbial Egyptian experience by default. Covertly, and by choice; this abnormal situation has made the South African electorates to think that division is more important than their unity. Decolonizing the mind is therefore central to recognizing and striving for unity while aiming for inclusive socio-economic policies that breeds inclusive development.

Abolishing All Mechanisms for Fixing Elections: The Citizens Initiative of Change the Electoral System of Croatia

Author(s): Robert Podolnjak / Language(s): English / Issue: 04+05/2015

In October 2014 a citizens’ initiative called ‘In the Name of the Family’ collected more than 380,000 signatures demanding a constitutional referendum on comprehensive electoral reform in Croatia. The Initiative aimed to introduce preferential voting for MPs; new criteria for the establishment of electoral constituencies; a lower electoral threshold from five to three per cent; abandon pre-electoral coalitions and joint lists of several parties; and postal and electronic voting. The constitutional referendum demanded by the initiative was not held due to the organizers collecting an insufficient number of signatures for the referendum petition to be valid, and only a limited reform of the electoral system was enacted with the introduction of preferential voting for MPs. What had started as a bottom-up citizens’ initiative (or ‘mass imposition’in Renwick’s terminology) finally ended as an ‘elite majority imposition’of an electoral reform.

Absolutorium a odpowiedzialność konstytucyjna. Komplementarność czy rozdzielność?

Author(s): Monika Kowalska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 26/2018

The answer for the question: is the vote of approval as the legal way of the count up the government as the budget executioner is enough to not be constitutional responsible by its particular members? The research problem and methods: The conclusions was made on the basis of science, the analysis of law and the parliamentary practice. The analysis was made using the system method, purposive method and the historical – law method. The process of argumentation: The Author tried to make the connections between the vote of approval with the constitutional law enforcement of every single member of the government on the State Tribunal. Before that, She described the idea of the vote of approval, its procedure, law changes from 1990s and its effects. Research results: The weakness of those institution is connected with the political procedure of the control of the budget or the lack of the connection between the law maker and the fact of refusal of the vote of approval the direct law effects. That is why, the Polish system is complementary not severability in the case of the vote of approval institution and the constitutional responsibility. Conclusions, innovations, and recommendations: Despite of the lack of the solutions according to the law dependences between the vote of approval and the constitutional responsibility, we can safely assume, that those vote of approval should not close the door to law enforcement of the constitutional responsibility by the members of the government, who realize the budget of the state.

Accuracy Data of the Presidential Voting Outcomes to an Inferential Bias of the New Romanian Electoral Code and Electronic Vote (2014)

Author(s): Mihaela Bărbieru / Language(s): English / Issue: 45/2015

The purpose of this study is to analyze the presidential elections in Romania, in November 2014, elections which have highlighted a number of problems of the Romanian society. For solving these problems there is an urgent need for the participation of all decision makers, local politicians and Romanian civil society. Election Code or electronic voting are just two of the debates, in the opinion of the author and specialists in the field, requiring special attention from both decision makers and the public. Perhaps the most important conclusion that emerges from our analysis is that no matter how secure victory seems for a party or a political organization, the electorate is the one who has the last word and can make a safe situation to become unsafe. Thus, although it was a difficult year for the local political class, 2014 gave Romania the first liberal president in its history of 140 years, in a complicated and agitated political context, practically exhausted by the struggle between a president-player and a dominant social-democrat party.

Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi: Kürt Sorununun Yeniden Tanımlanması ve Türkiye’nin Değişen Ortadoğu Politikası (2002-2011)

Author(s): Gül Arıkan Akdağ / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 1/2017

The transformation of Turkish Foreign Policy under AKP rule and its possible causes are frequently debated issues in the literature. The general literature has tried to define the parameters of this change through different levels of analysis. This study evaluates foreign policy outputs as an extension of domestic politics and has the purpose to investigate how the definition of the Kurdish problem and the means formulated to solve it, affect the AKP’s Middle Eastern Policy. First, it defines the main differences of the AKP and the previous actors in the way they have analyzed the problem and formulated the means to solve it. Then, the transformation from a security to liberal foreign policy perception under the AKP rule is tracked by not only focusing on the change of the actors where relations have been developed but also on the change of the content of these relations. The study will mainly focus on the changing relations developed with countries such as Iraq, Syria, Iran and Israel that are strongly related with the Kurdish issue.