On November 3, 2023, the Italian Council of Ministers approved a Bill to amend the Constitution, encapsulating what Giorgia Meloni’s Cabinet advertises as a measure to enhance executive stability and ...streamline policy implementation for medium to long-term objectives. The real goal appears to be cementing the Prime Minister’s grip on power after general elections, as evidenced by the intention to enshrine the majority bonus in the Constitution. Yet, from a constitutional law perspective, the majority bonus raises a fundamental issue related to how the Italian Constitutional Court interprets the eternity clause in the Constitution.
Nuestra discusión se enfoca en los problemas y vicisitudes más relevantes del actual sistema de gobierno de España. Específicamente, aborda la implantación de los criterios de paridad electoral y la ...trayectoria legislativa de la regulación del financiamiento de los partidos políticos en España. La introducción de cuotas de género para los candidatos electorales no ha estado libre de dificultades, pero se ha resuelto favorablemente en la jurisprudencia de la Corte Constitucional. En cuanto al sistema de financiación de los grupos políticos, los legisladores españoles cada vez fijan mayores restricciones para controlar la corrupción política que se origina en las prácticas irregulares que afligen la mayoría de las democracias contemporáneas.
The Bolshevik trade union debate of 1921 could be seen as a semi-parliamentary practice both in its form and content. Various groups and platforms participated in this discussion, using it as a ...tribune for spreading their views among the members of the party. This article examines the course of the discussion in the Petrograd party organization: especially, its form, representation, and the conflicts that it produced. Petrograd Bolsheviks saw the discussion not only as a space for a free circulation of opinions but also as a place for propaganda and political conflict. During debates, both of the rival platforms in the city (the supporters of Vladimir Lenin and the supporters of Lev Trotskii) tried to impugn the actions of each other. The party press also acted not as an impartial observer of the controversy but actively formatted a vision of the domination of Lenin's adherents in the discussion. Such a process brought discussions in the Bolshevik party close to the practice of a parliamentary debate, and produced a situation that I term 'semi-parliamentarism in one party'.
On 3 November 2023, the Italian Council of Ministers approved a constitutional reform bill to introduce the direct election of the Prime Minister in Italy. The reform would grant the Prime Minister ...significantly broader powers than those currently outlined in the Constitution. The proposal is now set to be evaluated by the Italian Parliament, and possibly submitted to a popular referendum if it is not approved by two-thirds of the members of both chambers. While it claims to ensure the continuity of governments – a known weak point of the Italian political system - it undermines the very foundation of parliamentary representation: the party system. Breathing the spirit of plebiscitary populism, this misguided reform, while seemingly looking towards Berlin for inspiration, risks in a worst-case scenario creating an atmosphere reminiscent of Capitol Hill on a fateful day a few years ago.
This contribution proposes a framework of transnational parliamentarism to study inter-parliamentary cooperation, and applies it to the interparliamentary conference on CFSP/CSDP. It asks to what ...extent the IPC’s functioning reflects its constitutive intergovernmental logic, or whether its behaviour in practice might be guided by a transnational logic, hence becoming something more than just the parliamentary mirror of an intergovernmental cooperation framework. To this end we outline three functions that are brought forward by transnational parliamentarism: policy-making, collective accountability and cooperation, and investigate to which extent these logics can be observed in the functioning of the IPC CFSP/CSDP. Applying the framework reveals a nuanced picture of an inter-parliamentary cooperation framework which to some extent goes beyond purely intergovernmental functions of domestic accountability and representation, and also includes the performance of policy-making and parliamentary cooperation functions.
A few months before general elections that might result in Slovakia joining Hungary's and Poland's illiberal takeover in Central Europe, its technocratic government is in crisis. This post shows how ...the weaknesses of Slovakia’s constitutional design have fueled the present malaise, and details the lessons we should draw from it for ordering the relationship between the head of state, parliament and the executive in other parliamentary systems with a directly elected president.
Abstract
This paper critically analyses the case for the parliamentary model of government combined with proportional electoral design. Using Ethiopia's practice of parliamentary model of government, ...and its diverse social structures, as a case study, the paper examines the viability of parliamentary model of government for transition to democratic polity. The paper relies on the theory of consociational democracy that focuses on the role of social and political elites, their deliberations and cooperation, as the fundamental instrument to stable democratic polity. Methodologically, the paper employed interpretive and qualitative meta-analysis of relevant laws and the literature. As such, this article focuses on the link between the model of government and transition to a democratic polity in a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society, more precisely, the risk that the presidential model dents transition to democracy in a multicultural and multi-ethnic society. I argue, therefore, in a social fabric where ethnic and cultural diversity is the basic defining tenet of the social order, parliamentary model of government combined with proportional electoral design offers better flexibility in the process of transition to consolidated democratic polity.
In contexts where media and political actors cannot or will not address crucial issues important to ordinary people, alternative forms of communication emerge. This article suggests Internet memes as ...one of these forms. Analysis on memes, comments and reactions posted on Moroccan satirical Facebook pages suggests that online groups that define themselves as entertainment or ‘just for fun’ can spark instances of political participation. Through digital discourse analysis, I identify hidden discourses on power relations and oppression embodied in memes of the country’s monarchy. Conceptually, I suggest the role of digital amateur activists as architects and instigators of political debates that seek to disempower systems of oppression. Internet memes, this article contends, can build groups of participation that engage in important but often silenced political conversations. Furthermore, theorising memes in Morocco contributes to debates on memetic culture, entertainment media and the significance of amateur culture beyond the Anglophone world.
Semi‐parliamentary government is a distinct executive‐legislative system that mirrors semi‐presidentialism. It exists when the legislature is divided into two equally legitimate parts, only one of ...which can dismiss the prime minister in a no‐confidence vote. This system has distinct advantages over pure parliamentary and presidential systems: it establishes a branch‐based separation of powers and can balance the ‘majoritarian’ and ‘proportional’ visions of democracy without concentrating executive power in a single individual. This article analyses bicameral versions of semi‐parliamentary government in Australia and Japan, and compares empirical patterns of democracy in the Australian Commonwealth as well as New South Wales to 20 advanced parliamentary and semi‐presidential systems. It discusses new semi‐parliamentary designs, some of which do not require formal bicameralism, and pays special attention to semi‐parliamentary options for democratising the European Union.
The article seeks to analyze political and legal views of the French liberal school of the second half of 19th century on freedom as a whole and on political freedom in particular.
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