Parliament and Democratic Politics

Abstract

Poland has the second longest parliamentary tradition in Europe (next to that of England amongst major states).1 It also belongs to ‘the small number of European countries where parliament is identified completely with the history of the nation and state’.2 A chamber of deputies, or Sejm, emerged, as early as 1493, developing out of a Senate which had developed from the Royal Council.3 The Nihil Novi statute of 1505 established the principle of parliamentary sovereignty by stipulating that the King could not pass legislation without the assent of the Sejm and the Senate. Although gentry democracy was by no means unusual in sixteenth-century Europe, its persistence in Poland until the eighteenth century, at the expense of Absolute Monarchy, was. After 1572, the Sejmiki or locally controlled gentry parliaments, decentralized power and institutionalized the elective monarchy. The magnates and their subordinate gentry whittled down royal power by extorting concessions and misusing the Liberum veto. The latter was abolished by the constitution of 3 May 1791 which introduced the principle of majority voting. It also attempted to balance the system by incorporating the monarch within the parliamentary framework as presiding officer of the Senate.KeywordsPrime MinisterPlenary SessionLegislative ProcessDemocratic PoliticsConstitutional AmendmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.