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Daß Wahlen in Osteuropa mehr oder weniger eine Farce sind, ist altbekannt. Weniger bekannt aber sind jene konkreten Umstände, die diese dazu machen, denn formal haben die meisten osteuropäischen Länder das parlamentarische System der bürgerlichen Demokratie übernommen und in einigen Ländern — Polen, DDR — gibt es sogar auf dem Papier ein Mehrparteiensystem. Zusammengeschlossen sind diese Parteien und weitere Massenorganisationen meistens in die jeweiligen »Volksfronten«, die allein das Recht haben, Kandidaten für die Volksvertretung aufzustellen. Fest verankert in den Statuten dieser Organisation ist die »führende Rolle« der jeweiligen Landes-KP »beim Aufbau des Sozialismus «. Damit haben die Parteien oder anderen gesellschaftlichen Organisationen im Parlament keine, politische Rolle mehr. Die Volksversammlung hat nur mehr auf staatlicher Seite jene Beschlüsse zu sanktionieren, die auf der Seite der Parteihierarchie längst vom Zentralkomitee gefällt worden sind. Aus diesen Gründen bleibt auch der parlamentańsche Einfluß nicht-kommunistischer Abgeordneter sehr gering.
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The purpose of our theoretical research is investigating the manner in which the modifications brought about to Law number 288/2015 concerning the use of the postal vote are able to secure the vote of the person. We are also concerned with the European legislation on this matter, debating similar provisions in the Italian and German electoral law. The right to vote exists in order to be performed, thus we analyzed the proposal in link with its purpose, that of encouraging people to vote. We participate in the voting process, determined to ferret out what the political life has to offer for our democracy, only to end up wondering about ourselves as citizens. The manner in which we construct electoral legislation should be link with the behavior of our citizens, as well as with the findings at the European level. We found that there is inherent insecurity in this type of voting and that Law no. 288/2015 lacks certain provisions that are used in the European legislation.
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The article analyzes the crisis of the majority principle as the preferred formula for determining the representativeness of Parliament in Italy, after the 2020’s constitutional referendum on the reduction in the number of parliamentarians, in comparison with what happens in some European constitutional experiences. The article’s focus is on highlighting the links between the crisis of parliamentary democracy, the crisis of democratic participation, and the influence of new technologies in the formation of consensus, which induce a progressive detachment of liberal and traditional institutions from civil society. In this context and to compensate for the imbalances of the parliamentary form of government, the choice of the electoral system must go in the direction of strengthening the representative principle.
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The aim of this article is to analyse te assumption and objectives of Poland's external security policy in the political concepts of the Liga Polskich Rodzin (the League of Polish Families) and Ruch Narodowy (the National Movement). These are two parties of the national camp, which during the Third Republic of Poland introduced their representatives to the parliament: LPR independently, while RN from the lists of Kukiz'15 and Konfederacja electoral committees. Both parties, thanks to their presence in the parliament, tried to change the reality by formulating and presenting to the citizens their vision of Polish politics from the point of view of national values. One of the elements of this vision was the concept of external security. LPR and RN considered the most important political principle of Poland to be guided by the national interest and the realization of certain postulates arising from this assumption. The article analyses the main and detailed goals that both parties set for themselves, the opportunities and theats that could facilitate of hinder their realization and the methods they used to achieve their arms. The article uses a testimonial analusis of political thought and comparative method.
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The first parliamentary elections in the Rijeka County were held in 1861. Five deputies were to be elected, so this paper presents the election process in all five districts of the county. Deputies were elected in regular as well as repeated elections, which occurred due to certain doubts about the election procedure or the withdrawal of individual deputies from the parliamentary mandate. The author analyzes the activity of the elected representatives of the Rijeka County in the Parliament of 1861, i.e. their compliance with the Instruction issued by the County, which contained guidelines for their parliamentary activities as well as other parliamentary work. However, as the Rijeka County gave instructions to other representatives from its area as well, i.e. representatives of privileged marketplaces and municipalities, these have also been included in the analysis of parliamentary work and compliance with the Instruction of the Rijeka County.
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This article focuses at powers of the Presidents of the Slovak Republic during the period from 1999 to 2019. Therefore, the aim is to compare how selected constitutional presidential powers were exercised after the fundamental constitutional changes in 1999. The most significant change was by introducing direct presidential elections, and adjusting the President ́s constitutional status. The ways how the individual Presidents holding their office within this period, exercised their powers towards the Parliament, government, and the judiciary do form the basic research questions here. Hence, whether a personal background of individual Presidents and political reality of seats distribution in the Parliament predetermined their exercise of these powers, or if there were some other rules present when they exercised their office. The findings presented in this research reflect 20 years of continuous exercise of Presidential office in the conditions of the Slovak Republic. This ultimately leads to the conclusion that the function itself, as well as its constitutional definition, has affected the exercise of Presidential powers more ultimately than the personal background of these directly elected Presidents at the beginning of their terms of office. The very first President, Mr. Michal Kováč, got into a major conflict with then Prime Minister, Vladimír Mečiar, even during the first year after taking the office. This conflict lasted nearly for five-years and altogether with the inability of the MPs to elect his successor led to the necessity of amending the Constitution. Presidents Rudolf Schuster, Ivan Gašparovič and Andrej Kiska gradually took their office, but only the second mentioned had managed to defend his position in an electoral competition. At present, the office of President is held by Zuzana Čaputová, who has been in the office since June 2019 - as the very first woman in this position in history of Slovakia.
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Participatory budgeting (PB) is often discussed as a tool to support active participation of citizens in the decision-making in the matters of the distribution of public resources. However, little was said about the possibility that the choice of a voting method used in the voting phase of the PB process could affect the participation in PB. In the Czech Republic, the Democracy 2.1 (D21) voting method is often used in municipalities implementing PB and additionally, it is promoted as a method to encourage more people to vote. This article aims to determine Czech municipalities with the D21 method and its modification, and to evaluate the impact of choosing these voting methods on participation rate in PB. The study suggests that the choice of a voting method is relevant for citizens´ engagement in voting. Based on the empirical findings, the D21 method and its modification are associated with a higher voter turnout in PB than another voting method. Further, the results underline the influence of external organizations offering online platforms for voting.
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The article deals with the effects of the pandemic on Romanian society and politics. In the first part of this article, I show why the changes in the Romanian society will not be as dramatic as it is suggested frequently in the public space. In this part, I appeal to various theories such as that of relative frustration, to the Tocqueville effect, to the theory of collective memory but also to the issue of comparability at the microsocial level, where protest and electoral behaviors are primarily formed. In the second part of the article, I show that deep changes can take place however in society and I present the forms of social change that can take place. I insist here on three major issues that can explain the mechanisms of social change. It is about what I call the breaking of the routine in organizations, the dilemma of missing services and the tacit accumulation of dissatisfactions.
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The subject of the presented article is the problem of political marketing as a way to electoral victory. Marketing, promotion and advertising are useful instruments for achieving political goals. The ability to apply these means in practice is an expression of growing professionalism in the field of political knowledge. Marketing instruments are useful not only during election campaigns, but also in the everyday activities of political leaders, social institutions, political parties, trade unions and other participants in political life. This may concern the design and practical application of various political strategies, creating the image of a politician of a newly established political organisation, advertising to the public the government's policy of significant importance for the state or promoting the image of a country, city or region . In recent decades, election campaigns have taken on a permanent character, not being limited as before to the closed periods immediately preceding voting. Thus, knowledge of marketing has become more important in the political environments of modern countries. The adaptation of professional marketing techniques to the sphere of political action and the use of the potential of modern media have significantly influenced the way politics is conducted. The goals, methods and strategy of a political campaign are, in a sense, determined by the audience and the media. The American campaign model has become a model for many countries, especially those – like Poland – which have embarked on the path of democratic transformation after 1989.
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The political instability of Italian governments, excessive fragmentation and party polarization, political corruption characterized Italy's political system from the unification of the state in the second half of the nineteenth century. Successive amendments to the parliamentary election law were an attempt to solve the above problems. Such a process also took place in 1993. The aim of this article is to present the legal provisions of the electoral law to the Chamber of Deputies in Italy of August 4th, 1993. The shape of the changes introduced, the mixed election formula and the original method of distributing seats (scorporo totale and scorporo pro quota) were an example of searching for new solutions in electoral engineering on the way to finding the perfect electoral law. The article uses mainly legal-dogmatic and legal-institutional methods.
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The 2018 local government elections were largely dominated by the nationwide competition between the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) and opposition parties. In addition, the amendment to the Electoral Code expanded the volume of cities and municipalities where elections were held in multi-member constituencies using the d’Hondt method, which could favor nationwide parties. The presented article analyzes the extent to which this influenced the level of politicization of the Polish local government, which was commonly perceived as a sphere of influence of local electoral committees. For this purpose, we examine the level of support for political parties and local committees in 167 municipalities and cities of the Silesian Voivodeship. The study confirms a positive relationship between the level of party politicization of local governments and the inhabitants’ number in the municipality. An in-depth analysis shows that local committees and non-party candidates for the mayor’s office definitely dominate in smaller municipalities and cities (up to 100,000 inhabitants). In contrast, the largest cities with poviat rights are characterized by a greater degree of politicization.
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The paper is aimed at analyzing Donald Trump's victory in the elections with a view to revealing its ties with the current rise in the nationalistic trend we see all over the world, as well as gauge the possible contribution such a system of thought might have on the further weakening of an already frail European project , exposed to repeated blows brought about by the "exit" paths chosen, or contemplated, by some of its members- be them voluntary- as in the case of Brexit or suggested by others- as in the case of the discussed, yet not materialized Grexit.
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This article is an essay which analyses at discourse level the Romanian presidential impeachment referendum that took place on 27 July 2007 and that was conducted in order to determine whether the president of Romania Traian Băsescu should be forced to step down. On 19 April 2007 the Romanian parliament suspended president Băsescu until the referendum would clarify the situation; the referendum’s results showed that 74.48% of the population wanted to keep him in office, therefore the Parliament's vote to impeach him didn’t stand. Starting from Traian Băsescu’s explanation that “I don’t defend a chair; I defend an European Romania; that Romania which I started to build together with the state institutions and all Romanians eight years ago, that Romania we must have, an European Romania ”we shall consider the populist appeals and all legitimacy strategies used by Traian Basescu reflected in the construction of the message to build his advertising campaign slogan to defend himself.
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The present paper analyses the US President’s inauguration speech on January 20th 2017 and seeks to point out how discourse reveals self-representation and social action. Following the ideas of context dependency, meaning in context and relating language to context the research focuses on genre analysis; more precisely Halliday’s triadic schema, whose main domains of interest are: field, tenor and mode. Thus, the study presents the participants, processes and circumstances of the presidential speech in its lexis, as well as discursive markers of the physical distance between speaker and audience.
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Content analysis was applied to list and analyse Eurosceptic references that appeared in press releases of Czech political parties, which are posted on their official websites. The article includes the themes that resonated with the political parties within their Eurosceptic narrative. Based on the information found, it was possible to identify the main motives of Euroscepticism and to distinguish political parties according to typologies of Euroscepticism. The added value of the article is the comparison of the Eurosceptic communication of political parties. Based on the results, it is therefore possible to identify how the parties argue their criticism of the EU and also to compare this argumentation across parties. Political parties' speeches on the EU can influence public opinion or social discourse on this political-economic union.
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The Putin regime stands out through the support of the population for the elected leader (at least formally under democratic conditions), the emergence and strengthening of the hierarchical subordination mechanism of the state authorities in relation to the central power (mechanism known in the specialized literature under the name “vertical of power”), creation of a hegemonic party, United Russia, which dominates the political scene and, not least, by maintaining the same authoritarian-electoral practices as in the 1990s, meaning incorrect elections marked by massive electoral frauds, endemic corruption, selective enforcement of laws, thus so as to benefit the power, increasing the degree of repression applied by the regime to all opponents, political parties, journalists, civic activists, oligarchs, and the subordination of the most important institutions to the Kremlin: the parliament, the justice system, the business sector, the media and NGOs.
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Political rights are an essential part of modern states’ constitutions as certain means through which power is exercised in the state. The article points to the existence and exercise of political rights in the Slovak Republic at the time of extraordinary circumstances related to the global COVID-19 pandemic. It analyses the options of their restriction within the sense of the Constitutional Law no. 227/2002 Statutes on State Security in Time of War, State of War, Extraordinary Circumstances and State of Emergency, and it also points to the decision-making activities of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic related thereto.
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This article analyses the special legal regimes that were introduced in Lithuania which dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic during the spring of 2020 and which decided on extraordinary measures in order to contain the spread of this vicious transmissible disease, and how the right to vote was ensured during the 2020 Parliament (Seimas) elections. After examining these special legal regimes, the article concludes that according to the Constitution, the threat to public health, inter alia caused by the worldwide spread of a vicious contagious disease, is not a constitutional ground for introducing a state of emergency per se, unless this threat to public health menaces the constitutional order or social peace. Therefore, the establishment of other special legal regimes – a disaster management regime and quarantine – was chosen, and were introduced by the government in accordance with the law. The analysis in this article shows that the right to vote during the 2020 Seimas elections was proportionately restricted due to the pandemic, and the pandemic did not prevent the holding of general, secret and direct parliamentary elections. The pandemic forced the Seimas to adopt long-awaited amendments to the laws that legalized electronic voting in the country.
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This article describes the prerogatives of the President of Ireland in the Constitution of 1937. The author presents the mechanism of “abstractive control” of the bill in compare to the constitution (judical review), the presidential pardon and the dissolution of the parliament at the request of the prime minister who does not have the support of the Dáil. Also presents the powers of the Presidential Commission and the tasks of the Council of State – institutions, which are related to the exercise of presidential prerogatives. The article begins with considerations on the classification of the Irish system of government and the role of history in shaping it in the 1937 Constitution. Based on the unique election of the President of Ireland – the author proposes to classify the Irish system as “alternative semi-presidentialism” – a subcategory of semi-presidentialism, also known as a “mixed” governmental system. The article also presents the significant limitations of the presidential powers with regard to the appointment of judges and members of the government.
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