The review analyzes the collection of papers of the Fifteenth International Scientific Conference “Current Problems of Parliamentarism: History and Modernity” (Tauride Readings 2021), held in St ...Petersburg in December 2021. The reviewer examines the problems and topics of the articles included in the collection as well as the issues put forward during the discussions and the round table. The analysis of various aspects of the activities of the State Duma in the early 20th century takes the central place in most studies. Special attention is paid to the materials devoted to parliamentarism in foreign countries (Great Britain, China, Croatia, and Germany).
The article is a review of the monograph entitled Bildung und Demokratie in der Weimarer Republik, published by Franz Steiner Verlag in 2022. This monograph is an effect of the academic conference ...“Bildung und Demokratie”, that took place in 2020 and was organized by the Weimar Republic Research Institution of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and Weimarer Republik e. V. The editors of the reviewed monograph, namely Andreas Braune, Sebastian Elsbach, and Ronny Noak, are renowned scholars specializing in problematics of the Weimar Republic. This review article contains a short de- scription and evaluation of all sixteen chapters published together as a monograph. As a whole, they refer to a wide spectrum of subjects. However, their common ground is the question of the education of both youth and adults on the subjects of democracy and republicanism during the period of the Weimar Republic. All issues raised in the monograph are also analysed in the context of the very complex political reality of Weimar Germany. The article ends with general remarks on the problematics discussed in the monograph.
The article examines the causes and conditions of the phenomenon of absenteeism, as well as the problems and features that exist today in the field of suffrage.
The political, social and ...psychological factors that influence the level of electoral activity
are analyzed and considered. The phenomenon of parliamentary absenteeism through the
prism of democracy and legitimacy of parliamentary activity is considered. The relationship between the political and legal culture of the population and the process of forming a clear civic position, civic activism and social responsibility has been studied. As practice shows, the conduct of election campaigns, the process of forming an electoral culture is complex and multifaceted. The formation of political and legal culture, civic activism and responsibility must begin at the level of secondary education. State and public institutions should play an active role in this process, which are designed not only to acquaint citizens with the election legislation, but also to explain its norms. An effective means of overcoming passivity and indifference today is to establish a public dialogue between citizens’ associations and state institutions. The use of transparent electoral technologies is also important. In general, to overcome absenteeism in modern domestic political practice, society and the state need politicians with national thinking and state-building strategy. The elected government must be open and accountable to the citizens who voted for it. Political elites must be responsible for the country’s political choices. In addition, in the age of information technology, the media are of great importance, which can also significantly affect the activity of citizens during elections, giving preference not only to advertising candidates, but also to election debates, comparative analysis of independent scientific institutions, objective and not engaged information coverage.
The article analyzes the monograph by Nina B. Khailova, a senior researcher at the Centre for the History of Russia in the 19th – early 20th Centuries of the Institute of Russian History of the ...Russian Academy of Sciences, dedicated to centrism in Russian liberalism in the early 20th century. The work under review is the first comprehensive study of this problem in historiography. It has been shown that based on a wide range of sources, some of which were published by its author, the monograph thoroughly studies the whole complex of issues concerning organizational features, social base, programmatic and tactical attitudes, and the main directions and features of the Duma and extra-parliamentary activities of centrist liberal parties. The reviewer notes an essential role of the appendix to the monograph (which is a biographical dictionary that includes information about the main figures of the liberal centrism of the early 20th century) and emphasizes a significant contribution of the monograph under review to the study of the history of Russian liberalism.
The problem of the leadership structures of human communities is more actual than ever since humanity is facing an ever-increasing number of challenges. Throughout recent history, countries developed ...three major types of political regimes: presidential, parliamentary, and semi-presidential. All these regimes are subject to criticism and each of them is proving to have advantages and disadvantages. The type of political system of Romania is yet a subject of debate. Although depending on various authors there are different criteria to include a certain political regime among parliamentary or semi-presidential types of the regime, I consider that according to the Constitution, Romania has a pure parliamentary form of government. Though, in practice, Romania seems to resemble what a number of specialists wrote about the French political system. That is, it alternates from a parliamentary to a presidential type of political regime.
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, however. 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 analysed the functioning and performance of semi-presidentialism. However, these studies have investigated the performance of semi-presidential subtypes 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 a 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.
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