Republican Parliament Research Articles

Cross-Country Analysis of the Impact of Corruption and Other Factors on Youth Presence in Parliament

The purpose of research is to study the influence of corruption and other factors on the presence of young people in formal politics. The motivation for the study of this issue was the decrease in the representation of youth in the traditional district and republican parliaments due to the existence of different determinants. Such a decrease, as a rule, affects the socio-economic indicators of most countries, since it is the youth who are the socially active, able-bodied segment of the population, whose support young people must find from the youth parliament representing their interests and needs. Corruption is considered to be the main reason for this decline. To prevent this, asian states such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and South Korea introduced institutional measures in the form of establishing an anti-corruption agency or other developed and developing countries carried out legislative anti-corruption reforms, which, on the contrary, led to counter productiveness due to excessive regulation. Thus, we will check whether the factor of corruption is indeed a significant variable influencing the presence of young people in parliament or whether the existence of other factors is more important. To test the main hypothesis, namely the negative relationship between the factor of corruption and the share of youth in parliament, we have analysed data from 90 countries based on the regression analysis method. The results showed that corruption is not a statistically significant variable, i.e., it does not have a significant impact on the political presence of young people in politics. The education factor showed a statistically significant result, which is logical since politically educated young people are most often active in politics, as a rule they become potential candidates for deputies either through youth wings or through non-state youth associations. Therefore, it seems important in public policy to increase political competitiveness to develop the potential of education.

A Forgotten Experiment

This paper is an account of China’s brief experiment with constitutional democracy and representative government during the early 20th century, spanning the late Qing Empire and the early Republic. The setting-up in 1909 of elected Provincial Consultative Boards was followed by the establishment in 1910 of the half-elected, half-appointed Advisory Council in Peking. This provided a battleground between the imperial court and the parliamentarians. Events such as the impeachment of the Grand Councillor were unprecedented and provided Chinese society and its elected representatives desperately needed training in modern parliamentary struggle. Councillors disillusioned with Manchu promises of reform became major promoters of the Republican revolution. Yet the early Republican parliament, dominated by radical revolutionaries whose idealism and all-or-nothing moral code rejected all compromise as betrayal, refused to acknowledge President Yuan Shikai’s actual strength and denied themselves a chance of arriving at a constitutional settlement with him. Exasperated by radical obstinance and unable to count on support from a strong centrist parliamentary force, Yuan in turn overreacted by dismantling the democratic institutions and installing a Latin American-styled “Super Presidency”. Establishmentarian and revolutionary elite loss of faith in moderation or accommodation ultimately pushed China away from democracy and onto a course towards totalitarianism.

Revenue and Regulation: Lessons for E.U. Leaders from the Roman Empire to the Modern Era

Government structures are more bureaucratic (and their policies more redistributive) in the European Union than in the United States. The more 'statist' character of Europe is hardly a surprise given the leading role of France in the post-WWII integration of the continent. Economic freedom was never a priority for the French monarchs and republican parliaments. Admiration for the invisible hand of the market may have inspired brilliant thinkers such as Cantillon, Say, and Bastiat, but theirs were voices crying in the desert of interventionism. We explore European bureaucracy from the institutional changes of the late Roman Empire through the French Revolution.

Some Questions for the United Kingdom’s Republican Constitution

This book provides an important addition to the debate about the nature and normative basis for the United Kingdom's constitutional ordering. It combines a strong argument against moves to adopt forms of "legal constitutionalism" with a defence of the country's existing "political constitution", one sourced in the ideals of republican government. This critical review explores the structure of Tomkins' claims, and raises three questions about how they might apply to certain aspects of the United Kingdom's constitutional order: the place of a republican United Kingdom in an increasingly integrated Europe; the place of the courts in a republican constitutional order; and the role of political parties in a republican parliament.

‘An Ancient Sage Philosopher’: Alexander Ross and the Defence of Philosophy

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)There was an ancient sage philosopherThat had read Alexander Ross overSamuel Butler, HudibrasFleetingly immortalised by Butler and again briefly disinterred by Dr Johnson, Alexander Ross remains largely a forgotten figure.1 An early seventeenthcentury Scot who spent much of his career within the Laudian Church of England, his oeuvre was cuttingly dismissed by Anthony Wood, in Athenae Oxoniensis, as comprising 'many books in Latine and English, and in Prose and Verse, the titles of which are now too numerous to insert'.2 Before the end of the century, where remembered at all, he had already become a figure of ridicule: his nit-picking pedantry, his bombast, his combustibility, his sheer wordiness in publication and, perhaps not least, his irritating Scottishness, all combined to make Butler's Ross a recognisable symbol of arcane learning and mis-placed scholarly hubris among English-speaking readers. Subsequently, he disappeared almost entirely from view. His principal historical function today is to serve as a gratifyingly ersatz natural philosopher, one of the 'blindly intolerant reactionaries' whose contribution to seventeenth-century culture had been rashly to defend an outdated Aristotelian cosmology in the face of compelling scientific contradiction.3Wider interest in Ross, then, has not survived the loss of a certain contemporary notoriety. Yet there remain plausible grounds for regretting the almost complete obscurity into which this most idiosyncratic and versatile of seventeenth-century scholars subsequently fell. During an exile in rural England which spanned the Civil Wars and Revolution, he produced an impressive array of publications, ranging from ingenious speculations in comparative religion and a ground-breaking first English translation of the Qur'an (which caused England's outraged republican Parliament in 1649 unsuccessfully to order the seizure of both text and printer) to less contentious works of reflective pastoral poetry.4 Even more importantly, the secular philosophical treatises, which are the central achievement of Ross's lifetime of obsessive authorship, have an overlooked intellectual significance. Strongly conservative in ways reflecting the political and theological commitments which the exile carried with him from the north-east of Scotland, his philosophical fixations starkly illuminate the mental furniture of a man who, like the better-known 'Aberdeen Doctors' who resisted the imposition of the Covenant in the later 1630s, felt it necessary to articulate a defence of revered tradition in the face of unwelcome contemporary change.5 It is with the investigation of Ross's long-forgotten career, and his creative philosophical response to the innovations of the time, that this essay is chiefly concerned.IAlexander Ross was born at Aberdeen on 1 January 1591 into a local family about which nothing of significance is known.6 The evidence suggests, however, that he was of reasonably respectable stock, for he was dispatched at an early age to Aberdeen Grammar School, the principal educational institution in the district. There he would have been taught by David Wedderburn, one of Scotland's major early-seventeenth-century poets, who was active at the school throughout Ross's childhood. Whilst Wedderburn achieved a higher public profile as poet-laureate to the town of Aberdeen (which even presented a copy of his Vivat Rex to Charles I during his coronation visit to Scotland in 1633), he would certainly have been a most distinguished teacher for the callow boy.7 He was the author of several outstanding pieces of neo-Latin verse, as well as of an English grammar for use by teachers; and it seems more than likely that Ross's later expertise in classical languages, together with his complete command of Greek and Roman literature, will have received powerful early encouragement from this pedagogic influence.Although the most substantial discussion of Ross's life and works, an unpublished 'Account of Ross and His Bibliography' by J. …

Parliamentary politics under Gorbachev: Opposition and the failure of socialist pluralism

Opposition in Gorbachev's reformed Soviet parliaments helped show the limits of political perestroika. Opposition came from the democratic Inter‐Regional Deputies’ Group (I‐RDG), whose actions in 1989–90 changed the political agenda by questioning the powers granted to the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet. The democratic opposition and the changes that it helped bring about therefore undermined the centre and its ideas on politics and contributed to Gorbachev's failure. Conservative opposition came from the Soyuz (Union) group, Soyuz however was a reactive force in 1990–91, as the centre of political action had shifted from the all‐Union parliaments to the new executive presidency and the republican parliaments, a shift facilitated by the actions of the I‐RDG.

Perestroika and the Problem of Socialist Renewal

Mikhail Gorbachev promised the assembled delegates of the 19th Party Conference of the CPSU in the summer of 1988 that democratization, economic reform, and transformation of the political will make perestroika irreversible; through revolutionary perestroika our society will reach a new state, and socialism will be given a humane and image.' Now, in the summer of 1990, the collapse of the Soviet has reached crisis proportions; ethnic unrest continues to flare up across the country; radical leaders like Boris Yeltsin have emerged to challenge Gorbachev and his advisors as leaders of perestroika, and the slogans sovereignty and market economy have become the rallying cries of most of the USSR's republican parliaments. While the debate over the irreversibility of perestroika continues, the real struggle is over the shape of the qualitatively new of Soviet society - will there be a Union, and will there be socialism? All of the basic premises that together constituted the foundation of the neo-Stalinist in Soviet domestic politics have now been called into question: strict central planning, collectivized agriculture, the leading role of the party, centralism, even the false federalism of the Union itself, are being challenged from above and from below. The old bureaucratic-administrative system has its defenders - both in the state and in society - and this is part of the drama. But the more interesting issue is that among reformers in the Soviet Union there is profound disagreement about what perestroika means, about what kind of should replace the old - in other words, about the correct alternative to Stalinism. In the Soviet Union today, perestroika is at once a set of policies and a concept that groups with profoundly different agendas are attempting to appropriate and infuse with a meaning amenable to their visions of social change. The extent to which any of these visions approaches the new, humane, and democratic socialism of Gorbachev's speech is the central question - not only for the future of Soviet society, but for the future of the socialist project more generally. The crisis of the Soviet and the attempt to redefine the meaning of socialism in the USSR have developed at a time when socialists in the West are also struggling to construct or reconstruct a viable socialist alternative to what has been called actually existing capitalism2 in America and Western Europe. This debate ranges from differing strategies

Renegotiating Soviet Federalism: Glasnost and Regional Autonomy

The current expansion of free political association under glasnost' has focused the political energies of mobilized national movements on demands for republican autonomy. Reform-minded elements in the Gorbachev leadership have encouraged these movements, seeing them as counterweights to central governmental bureaucracy. Aspirations for national statehood have reached fullest expression in the Baltic republics, where the republican parliaments have expressed overwhelming support for economic and cultural sovereignty, but such sentiments are voiced by national intelligentsias in each republic. Moscow has adopted a program of republican decentralization as a solution to the growing problem of the federal budget deficit, but the implications of republican economic autonomy for the cohesiveness of the federal union are fundamental and far-reaching.

Constitutional Socialism in Yugoslavia

The new constitution recently inaugurated in Yugoslavia expresses the profound political and economic changes which have been taking place during the course of the last decade in the country and which are still under way. The beginning of the changes commenced as far back as in 1950 with the law on management of economic enterprises and other organizations under state ownership and control, on the part of workers' collectives in them. This law and its implementation brought about deep political and economic changes in the coun try in the next period. In the sphere of political relations and institutions the system of self-government was introduced. Po litical self-government consists in that all political forms of gov ernment, including the state authority, are performed by all members of the society directly (in communes) or on the basis of representatives in the federal or republican parliament. This system seeks to devolve on associative political bodies— assemblies in communes, republics, and in the federation—all functions of state authority and to integrate the functions of political parties into the system of political government on the part of the entire society. Along with these political changes, the economic system loses the characteristic of a centralized, administratively conducted planned model of the socialist econ omy, such as it was so far, and assumes the characteristics of a new model of planned economy with strongly expressed ele ments of the market and of an independent economic activity of decentralized economic organization. In this sense the Yugo slav social system differs both from the model of the socialist system in the Soviet Union and from the existing systems in the West.

Austria's Corporative Constitution

As a feature of a reformed May Day celebration, the cabinet of Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss, on May 1 last, decreed a new constitution for Austria. The rather lengthy document, consisting of 182 articles and covering some 32 pages in the official Bundesgesetzblatt, is mainly the work of Dr. Otto Ender, former chancellor, who, on July 18, 1933, joined the Dollfuss cabinet as minister for constitutional and administrative reform. It had been approved on April 30 at the final session of the lower house of the republican parliament, the Nationalrat. Owing to the cabinet's cancellation of the mandates of 72 Social Democratic deputies and of two other deputies who had manifested National Socialist sympathies, only 91 of those who had been elected to the Nationalrat in 1930 were eligible to attend the session.