Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Based on three case studies, this paper examines the influence of parliamentary opposition parties on Georgia's foreign policy as a country with a hybrid regime. The study covers an eight-year period from the start of the Georgian Dream party's rule in 2012 to the end of 2020 when pro-Western opposition forces were strong and the government pursued a "normalization" policy with Russia. An analysis of the cases reveals that the parliamentary opposition has leverage in foreign policy to put pressure on the government. Yet the case studies show that the opposition's influence on foreign policy was manifested mainly by non-parliamentary means, particularly in mobilizing international actors and shaping public opinion on specific foreign policy issues.

This article examines transitions between presidential, parliamentary and semi-presidential systems in democracies. Using two major datasets, it identifies nine such transitions in eight different countries: Brazil 1961, France 1962, Sri Lanka 1977, Slovakia 1999, Moldova 2000, Turkey 2007, Kenya 2008, Kenya 2010, and the Czech Republic 2012. Findings from a close examination of these cases include the following: most transitions involve the semi-presidential regime type; serious crises precede the transitions in nearly all the cases and change is often used as a means of solving these crises; electoral volatility and turnover in government precede most transitions; change serves different functions in different political contexts, ranging from facilitating acceptance of anti-establishment executives to implementing power-sharing deals; and once achieved, regime change becomes an almost permanent fixture on the political agenda, with debates escalating rather than dying down.

This book explores the nature of parliamentary representation within the autocratic regimes of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It argues that although many parliaments are elected under flawed or non-competitive elections, autocratic governments are nevertheless aware of the need to appear representative and accessible to the demands of citizens and that even limited parliaments manage to represent their voters, sometimes in ways not intended by the regime. The book examines how elites structure, manage and organize representation; how they foster the desired kind of representation; and how they limit the ways in which parliaments fulfil their representative functions. The book concludes that Kazakhstan is a more hegemonic form of autocracy and the Kyrgyz Republic a more competitive form and that the degree to which parliaments fulfil their representational functions and how much room for manoeuvre individual MPs have depends largely on how much parties control candidate selection and the daily schedule and administrative resources of parliaments.

A major lacuna in the empirical investigation of government stability in Western European parliamentary regimes is the failure to test rigorously the hypothesis that the ideological diversity within governments influences their survival in office. This study attempts to remedy this deficiency by developing and testing measures of the concept based on a wide variety of sources, including expert scales of party positions, voter-based estimates of party ideologies, and assessments of party positions derived with the aid of the European Manifestos Project's coding of electoral platforms. The key findings are that not only is ideological diversity inversely related to government survival, even when other relevant factors are taken into account, but that this connection seriously challenges bargaining environment interpretations of stability advanced within the past 2 years.

"This title was first published in 2001. Based on a unique set of structured interviews with parliamentarians and additional interviews with party leaders and activists, this significant volume provides an illuminating account of the formation of the new democracies in Czechoslovakia and later, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Examining efforts to construct stable democratic parliamentary regimes in the wake of communist breakdown, it provides a rigorous analysis of parliaments' relations with the electorate and the executive, as well as their internal working. Richly detailed and clearly written, this original study is an invaluable addition to the collection of anyone interested in post-communist Europe or parliamentary studies."--Provided by publisher.

Do semi-presidential regimes perform worse than other regime types? Semi-presidentialism has become a preferred choice among constitution makers worldwide. The semi-presidential category contains anything but a coherent set of regimes. We need to separate between its two subtypes, premier-presidentialism and president-parliamentarism. Following Linz's argument that presidentialism and semi-presidentialism are less conducive to democracy than parliamentarism a number of studies have empirically analyzed the functioning and performance of semi-presidentialism. However, these studies have investigated the performance of semi-presidential sub-types in isolation from other constitutional regimes. By using indicators on regime performance and democracy, the aim of this study is to examine the performance of premier-presidential and president-parliamentary regimes in relation to parliamentarism and presidentialism. Premier-presidential regimes show performance records on par with parliamentarism and on some measures even better. President-parliamentary regimes, on the contrary, perform worse than all other regime types on most of our included measures. The results of this novel study provide a strong call to constitution makers to stay away from president-parliamentarism as well as against the idea of thinking about semi-presidentialism as a single and coherent type of regime. ; Open Access APC beslut 14/2017

Abstract
The British parliamentary system is generally praised for its longevity and stability. However, the flaws of British democracy were highlighted following the referendum of June 2016. This withdrawal was not only an earthquake for the European project, it was also the source of unprecedented constitutional controversies in the UK itself. In particular, it raised a series of questions about the respective competences of national institutions and local institutions in the field of European affairs and, more broadly, in foreign affairs. Since the British Constitution is not a written one, the rules for the distribution of competences in these areas are essentially the result of practice.
The UK's parliamentary regime, that was in the process of collapsing in September 2019 appears, against all odds, to have recovered following the early elections of 12 December 2019. The result of those elections has apparently provided a way out of the crisis, although it is unclear whether it will be temporary or not.