Parliamentary Institutions Research Articles

PARLIAMENTARISM IN THE SYSTEM OF ENSURING THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF MODERN RUSSIA

The article is devoted to the definition of the role and importance of parliamentarism in ensuring the national security of modern Russia. The identified problems involve the consideration of such key points as the definition of possible directions of the parliament’s activities to ensure national security, including through the prism of the legitimacy of the parliamentary institution itself, as well as the analysis of the features of the formation and functioning of the parliamentary system, creating difficulties in the implementation of the global task of ensuring national security. On the basis of various approaches, factors that reduce the effectiveness of parliamentary activity are analyzed, key features of institutionalization and functioning that negatively affect the perception of parliamentary institutions by society are identified. A set of measures to increase the legitimacy of parliamentarism and the effectiveness of its institutions is proposed. Attention is also paid to the problems of political responsibility of the ruling elite, concrete measures and mechanisms are proposed to improve the institution of political responsibility, which ultimately should lead to the activation of the activities of parliamentary institutions to ensure national security.

The role of political parties in multi-level environmental governance in the European Union and Germany

The subject of the study is the involvement of political parties in multi-level environmental governance in the European Union, using Germany and its federal states as an example. This article describes the theoretical and practical foundations of multi-level governance. The place of European parties and their national member parties from Germany in the institutional system and decision-making process of environmental policy has been defined. For practical illustration, the climate policy guidelines of Germany’s main national parties (the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Alternative for Germany, the Free Democratic Party of Germany, the Left and the Alliance 90 / The Greens) and their European affiliations (the European People’s Party, the Party of the European Socialists, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, the European Green Party and the Party of European Left) were compared with an emphasis on the new targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The unique opportunity for parties to participate in environmental policymaking at all key levels, which is not limited to parliamentary institutions has been highlighted. Appointments to environmental positions at different levels often correlate with membership of the most environmentally oriented parties, although the level of environmental involvement may differ between national parties and their European affiliations. Among other things, this has to do with participation in governing coalitions and dependence on a senior partner in them, as shown by the examples of the Bundestag and the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. The final decision depends heavily on the unity of the coalition at federal and state level, whereas in the European Parliament there is a great differentiation of opinions, which allows even the most influential European People’s Party to be blocked from voting.

Enhancing the quality of legislation: the Italian experience

ABSTRACT The article is based on the observation of an increasingly poor quality of legislation in Italy which has led to citizens experiencing disaffection towards regulatory instruments and, at the same time, mistrust in the institutions responsible for producing, implementing and enforcing legislation. This situation has certainly become more and more serious during the Covid-19 pandemic with the adoption of regulatory acts containing rules that, on the one hand, severely restrict citizens’ freedoms and, on the other, are improvised, often contradictory and difficult to understand and interpret. Starting from this observation, the article analyses the reasons of this crisis, focusing on the complexity of a multi-level system, with the increasing influence of the legislation coming from the European Union, and on the growing weakness of parliamentary institutions and the consequent increase in government legislative power through ‘decree-laws’. The urgency and ‘occasionality’ that frequently characterises these law-making procedures are not compatible with a legislative design focused on better regulation tools, thereby making the commitment to clarity, consistency and homogeneity of legislative acts completely regressive. In this context, it is essential to increase the transparency of the legislative process and to enable citizens and stakeholders to take part in it, thereby restoring confidence in legislation. It is also necessary to bring together in the legislative rule-making process different professional skills and knowledge: legal, linguistic, economic-financial, statistical, social and even behavioural sciences. This will shape legislative intervention geared towards making regulatory acts as capable as possible of producing a phenomenon of spontaneous compliance with the objectives set by the legislation. Finally, these tools must be accompanied by a shift in political culture and a change in vision shared by all institutional actors, starting from Parliament, in order to recompose the material Constitution of the country on new bases.

Parliamentary options for a multi-ethnic state: sovereignty, frontier governance, and representation in early twentieth-century China

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs two modes of parliamentary representation of (post-)imperial diversity in early twentieth-century China. One model foresaw a differentiated representation of the borderlands in the nascent parliamentary institutions, using upper house seats to garner loyalty from the nobility at the same time as it denied electoral participation. The second model stipulated electoral equality between the borderland regions and the inner provinces. While the first model parliamentarized imperial forms of governance, it was also informed by and partially conformed to global models of governance. The second was informed by notions of undivided national sovereignty. In the late Qing Empire, the government decided against the second model, for it was deemed to presuppose a degree of national integration not given in the Empire. The challenges posed by the proclamation of the Republic of China, in particular the declarations of independence of Mongolia and Tibet, led to a strong emphasis on the newly-founded state’s unity and the swift adoption of the second model. This choice, however, was neither uncontested nor was its implementation complete.

Introduction

ABSTRACT This special issue explores concepts and practices related to parliamentarism in the imperial and post-imperial transformations of the Qing and Russian Empires, as well as their successor states. It demonstrates that representative institutions were a crucial factor in the establishment of modernized empires or post-imperial states. In particular, the issue explores how the ‘mining’ of own imperial past and present for concepts and practices was used in combination with the globally circulating forms of representation in the development of parliamentary institutions, how particular interest groups defined through ethnicity, region, religion, or class were represented, and, ultimately, how the parliamentary developments informed the formation of single-party regimes in the post-imperial settings.

Парламентаризм в умовах політичного транзиту: досвід Чеської Республіки

For the first time in the Ukrainian political science, considers the development of parliamentarism in the Czech Republic in a context of political transit in a comprehensive manner. It indicates the ambiguity and complexity of the process of parliamentary democracy’s functioning in the country. The main stages of the Czech parliamentary institutions’ establishment have been identified. The key tendencies and the peculiarities of the current Czech parliamentarism modernisation have been defined. The constitutional and legal status of the Parliament of the Czech Republic has been outlined and its place in the existing checks and balances system determined; the Czech Parliament party structuring characteristics have been determined and the most important factors of the coalition formation potential of parliamentary fractions have been revealed; based on the empirical indicators, the party system’s stability and efficiency in the Czech Republic have been investigated. The fundamental principles of the liberal parliamentarism concept (Ch.L.Montesquieu, John Locke, John Mill) have served as the theoretical and methodological basis for these article, which considers the power division to be the main principle of the state system, in which the executive power is accountable and subject to the legislative power. In order to achieve the tasks, the author used general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction) as well as special politilogical methods. The methods of induction and deduction have been used in formulating the concept of “political transit” and its constituent elements. The comparativehistorical method gave the defender of the thesis the opportunity to understand the main directions of parliamentary institutions’ development at different historical stages of the Czech statehood and identify the factors that influenced the change in their status. The system method allowed to assess the constitutional and legal status of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, primarily its place and role in the political system of society and the relationship with other bodies of state power. On the whole, we can assume that the experience of the parliamentarism functioning in the Czech Republic is of great practical significance for Ukraine and other post-communist states, since it gives a stimulus to the society and ruling elites of these countries to further improve and develop their political institutions.

An Agonistic Theory of Democratic Parliamentarism. The Case of the Walloon Parliament

Chantal Mouffe is one of the most discussed political theorists of recent years. One of her most important theoretical contributions is her critique of deliberative democracy for its inability to think the political in terms of antagonism and dissensus. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine to what extent Mouffe’s theory of democracy, which she calls “agonistic pluralism” and which she proposes as an alternative to deliberative democracy, can be used to think about the role of the parliamentary institution in a democratic polity. To this end, we mobilize a qualitative method based on the realisation of fifteen semi-structured interviews in order to analyze the case of the Walloon Parliament, with the aim of showing how democratic parliamentarism realizes the staging of the antagonism which, according to Mouffe, founds the domain of the political1.

Ukrainian Central Council as Revolutionary Parliament of Ukraine

The revolution of 1917-1921 is a bright page in the centuries-old history of the Ukrainian state. The special place in it belongs to Ukrainian Central Council (CCU), under the leadership of which Ukraine went through the difficult path of building its own state from autonomy to the proclamation of Ukrainian National Republic and its full state independence and sovereignty. Therewith, the CCU attempted to introduce democratic institutions and parliamentary forms of government. The relevance of the study is explained by the fact that this experience left a noticeable mark on the legal consciousness of Ukrainians and the attempt to build a parliamentary model has a considerable impact on the solution of modern problems of state creation. The purpose of the study is to analyse the organisation of Ukrainian Central Council as a parliamentary institution in the conditions of the revolution. A retrospective study of the CCU experience reflects the political interests of different groups of society, is useful for understanding modern problems of parliamentarism, the interaction of civil society and the state. The methodological basis for studying the structure, composition of the CCU, its legal forms of activity is based on philosophical, general scientific, and historical-legal methods of scientific knowledge. These methods allowed determining the main task of the CCU – the revival of Ukraine. It is concluded that state revival, as a constituent task which could be carried out only by a representative body that would be established on democratic principles, its composition would express the will of the people, and, if it had sufficient organisational and legal resources to fulfil this task (a stable structure, organisational and legal forms of activity, an effective auxiliary apparatus, the corresponding status of the deputies, the optimal work schedule)

The (Re)Naming of the Finnish Representative Assembly 1809–1919: State-Building, Representation and Sovereignty

This article examines the names and naming of Finnish parliamentary institutions in relation to European debates, focusing on the period from the Diet of Porvoo in 1809 to the Constitution Act of 1919. The article presents a history of the adoption of the current names of the Finnish parliament – <em>valtiopäivät</em> and <em>eduskunta</em> in Finnish, <em>riksdagen</em> in Swedish, as well as a number of failed proposals. It analyzes how and why the names of the Finnish representative assembly were created and established. The article examines naming as a political act. The name formation was influenced by Finland’s position as a grand duchy of the Russian Empire and the constitutional and language tradition of its former mother country Sweden. However, naming of the assemblies took place in relation to wider European debates and developments. Political actors used translation and naming innovatively to (re)define, (re)describe and (re)conceptualize Finland’s status and national representation. The aim was to raise Finland and its nascent representation among European constitutional states and their parliamentary institutions. The article shows, for example, that <em>valtiopäivät</em>, applied since 1847 to the estate meeting in Porvoo in 1809, preceded the adoption of <em>valtio</em> as the Finnish word for the state, forming a crucial step in defining the Grand Duchy of Finland as a state.

Progress with Parliamentary ‘Power over the Purse’: The Case of South Africa

AbstractRenewed interest in legislative ‘power over the purse’ has seen a growing demand in modern democracies for parliaments to strengthen their authority over national budgets. However, weaknesses in legislative and institutional reforms intended to bring about more assertive parliaments with powers to amend budgets raise issues on how parliament’s role in influencing the budget differs from what formally conferred powers anticipate. Specifically, to what extent can formal parliamentary institutions be expected to advance the aspiration of greater legislative influence on the budget? This article critically considers the institutional arrangements of the South African parliament that inhibit effective execution of its role in budget decision-making. In particular, it explores three determinants: extent of formal powers, institutional capacity, and incentives facing individual MPs.

The Evolution of Jordan's Parliamentary Institution and the Impact on Political Reform: A Critical Review

This research is a critical study for Jordanian parliamentary evolution and its impact on political reform in Jordan. We hypothesize a significant correlation between parliamentary development and democratization in Jordan. The study found that the Parliamentary institution, which represents the core of democracy in Jordan, is weak and lacking the ability to perform its main political duties. Researchers concluded that democracy in Jordan is in a status of stagnation. Since its formation in 1929 until 2019, parliament’s political power within the Jordanian political system remains substantially ineffective. The Executive Branch of government possess far more political power than the Legislative Branch of government. This fact that our research found negatively affects the credibility of the whole Jordanian political reform rhetoric. We use the descriptive analytical historic approach and content analysis of the legal provisions that govern the parliamentary development in Jordan. KeyWords: Parliamentary Evolution, Political Reform, Legal and Constitutional Reform.

Using semantic annotations on political debate videos for building open government based lawmaking

AbstractThe traditional concept and practice of lawmaking is being transformed by the open government paradigm. It involves a new digital model that links three principles: transparency, participation and collaboration. However, the information system‐enabled solutions in this context are still in their infancy, which none available that address the three crucial challenges: (1) providing the functionalities for semantic search and retrieval of video clips on political debates about legislative proposals, (2) support of open participation and collaboration with contextual information in lawmaking processes and, (3) automatic generation of outcomes achieved in the lawmaking lifecycle. In this article, we describe the underlying methods and techniques leading to address these challenges when a semantic‐driven approach is applied for the development and validation of the real‐world scenario of open government‐based lawmaking systems. To evaluate the value created by using a semantic‐driven approach as computational backbone, the development and testing of a software platform as case study was carried out together with experts from a parliamentary institution and analysed the user experience in parliamentary settings with end‐users. The results show how the use of the appropriate techniques for the adoption of a semantic assumption is a key enabler for the management and retrieval of information tasks relating to the lawmaking lifecycle providing a transparent, participatory and collaborative approach in a holistic way.

Metamorphic Moment of the Indian Polity: Anatomizing the Evolution and Changing Dynamics of the Indian State against the Protean Nature of Cooperative Federalism

The elusive and paradoxical nature of Indian polity has been evident in the amalgamation of Western patterns of bureaucratic organization, participatory politics with indigenous practices and institutional framework that had an organic growth on the Indian soil. While post-colonial India was characterized by the incorporation of democratic political ethos and structural architecture, Westminster model of parliamentary government and representative legal institutions, it did not imply the exact replication of the British architectonic system of advanced industrial democracy. As the Indian political process is subjected to dramatic transmutations and cyclical changes, it has eventually acquired a mass character and vibrancy with the exuberant participation of marginalized and underprivileged political formations and social groups in the political arena, coupled with the regionalization of the polity, altering the terms of political domination and sowing the seeds of an increasingly complex mechanism of negotiation, competitive bargaining, alliance and coalition-building, in a cooperative federalist arrangement. The principle objective of this paper is to put an emphasis on the role of the Indian state, the transformation of Indian federalism and the political process, while holistically encapsulating the development and multidimensional patterns associated with the Indian political system, tracing the departure from the heyday of the Congress system and Nehruvian civic nationalism to the crystallization of a majoritarian edifice, propelled by Hindu Nationalism.

ON THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF PARLIAMENTARY CONTROL

In this article deals with issues related to the government control by the lower chambers of the world's parliaments, including the Legislative Chamber of the Oliy Majlis of the United States, France, Germany and the Republic of Uzbekistan, as well as improving the parliamentary institution oversight to transform our national parliament into a true school of democracy, establishment of effective cooperation mechanisms of lower house deputies of parliament with the deputy corps of local Councils.

L'apport des instituions parlementaires aux organisations régionales: l'expérience des Amériques

La littérature récente identifie les institutions parlementaires internationales (IPI) comme un acteur significatif des relations internationales contemporaines. Parallèlement, des chercheurs observent un mouvement d’ouverture des organisations internationales et régionales en faveur des acteurs autres que les États. La combinaison des deux phénomènes crée un contexte favorable pour l’étude du rôle des parlementaires dans le fonctionnement des organisations régionales d’autant plus que peu d’analyses comparatives ont été publiées sur le sujet particulièrement hors d’Europe. Utilisant les Amériques comme cas d’étude, le texte propose une étude comparative du rôle des IPI dans les organisations régionales. Nous traçons d’abord les contours d’un bref cadre d’analyse pour examiner ensuite le rôle des associations parlementaires et, enfin, celui des parlements régionaux.

The institutional position of national parliaments in the European Union: developments, explanations, effects

ABSTRACT This article reviews the literature on the institutional position of national parliaments in the EU. It focuses on new institutional developments, explanations, and effects discussed over the course of the last decade. Existing datasets on parliamentary oversight institutions in EU affairs and economic governance have been extended to 2020 to inform the discussion. A systematic overview of new analyses of the effects of oversight institutions in EU and domestic politics is offered as well. Cutting across the debate as to whether parliaments are multi-level or domestic players in the EU, this review concludes that the last decade has seen growing policy specialization in the institutional position of national parliaments at the European and national levels, and that the causes and consequences of this development remain largely unstudied.

Символический капитал парламентария как фактор укрепления доверия к Государственной Думе

Introduction: the article examines formal and informal political and communication practices for their effectiveness in improving the perception of a parliamentary institution. Objectives: to identify the features of symbolic capital formation of a State Duma deputy using political and communicative practices. Methods: comparative analysis, content analysis, sociological regulatory analysis. Results: The article analyzes the political and communication practices used by the State Duma deputies and their impact on building trust inparliament. Informal practices that parliamentarians use while implementing the representative function are highlighted as having the greatest potential in the context of the need to increase trust in the State Duma. Conclusions: trust to a parliamentary institution is a combination of institutional trust (to the State Duma as a body of state power) and transpersonal trust (in deputies). A parliamentarian, to whom the State Duma delegates its symbolic capital, can either increase confidence in the institution by their actions, or lower it due to the communication failures, inability to use modern technologies, the need to follow the political change, etc. It is necessary to develop a set of measures to increase confidence in the parliamentary institution.

Bilingualism in Canada: the legislation&amp;apos;s reform

The Official Language Act plays a key role in the lives of Canadians. Its purpose is to ensure respect for English and French as the official languages of Canada in governmental and parliamentary institutions, support the development and vitality of official language minority communities, set out powers, duties and functions of federal institutions with respect to the official languages of Canada. The Government of Canada has decided to modernize the Act to ensure that it continues to serve Canadians in a changing environment. That is why the Government of Canada showed its commitment to promote, protect and update a law by sharing its vision for official languages reform in February, titled French and English: Towards a substantive equality of official languages in Canada. After 30 years since the last major update, a modernization of the Official Languages Act is necessary to allow the law to keep pace with the social, demographic and technological realities in today’s society, which did not exist during the last revision in 1988. The bill recognizes the diversity of provincial and territorial language regimes and focuses on learning opportunities of the first language in minority settings and on learning opportunities of a second official language in a majority situation to improve the rate of bilingualism among Canadians. The bill also seeks to protect institutions of official language minority communities both for the English-speaking minority in Quebec and for the French-speaking minority in the rest of the country, and proposes new ways to better protect French in Canada, including in Québec.

Parlamentaryzm Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego XIV–XVIII w.

Parlamentaryzm Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego XIV–XVIII w.

Ukrainian Representation In The Galician Regional Seimas: Legal Status And Powers

The scientific article deals with the processes related to the historical experience of Ukrainians in the activities of the Galician Regional Seimas as an important stage in the struggle for the formation of civil society structures. The author examines the legal status and powers of Ukrainian deputies in the Galician Regional Sejm; characterizes the list of requirements that were set for ambassadors (the name of the position of deputy) in order to be elected; a list of grounds that made the election impossible; rights and responsibilities of deputies and activities in the Seimas, etc.&#x0D; Ukrainian ambassadors to the regional Sejm were representatives of the region’s interests. From the very beginning of their activity they affirmed the national identity of Galicians, fought for their socio-economic, national-political and cultural- educational rights, took an active part in the formation of language-educational and electoral legislation, as well as in the activities of national parliamentary institutions. In general, the National Seimas was interpreted as a field of struggle for national equality and, thus, awakened the national consciousness of broad sections of the population.&#x0D; The creation and activity of the Galician Seimas became an important experience for Ukrainians on the way to forming their own concept of national statehood and an effective place for gaining political experience.&#x0D; Studying and analyzing the facts from the historical past ofUkraine, it is necessary to make a clear understanding of the aspirations of Ukrainians to create their own independent, conciliar, nationally worthy state with all its attributes. It is the events of the late nineteenth - early twentieth century. in Eastern Galicia and the activities of Ukrainian ambassadors in the Galician Regional Sejm were the key moments in confirming the state-building consciousness of the Ukrainian population of the region and the ability to find a political compromise at the right time.