Suchergebnisse

The state's energy policy is one of the most important public policies affecting the safety of citizens and the development of the state, and the LNG Terminal in Świnoujście is a tool for shaping Polish energy policy. The installation was put into use in 2015. Currently, its capabilities guarantee the supply of 1/3 of the national gas demand, and after the expansion, it will be already a half. Energy as a product must be available continuously, also in times of national and international perturbations such as pandemics. The aim of the article is to investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic affected the operation of the terminal and the import of liquefied natural gas to Poland. The author used the microsystem analysis as a research method and answered the questions: "How did the Szczecin-Świnoujście port function during the pandemic?," "How was shipping functioning during the pandemic?," and "How did LNG prices develop during the pandemic?".

The article discusses the electoral system in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Elections are the process of citizens electing their representatives for specific positions. In this context, the method and principles of conducting the election are important, so that its fundamental rule - universality - is preserved. Although more than a dozen electoral regulations were in force since 1989 and the traditional model of voting at a polling station was still in place, the Polish legislator also provided for postal and proxy voting. Due to the risk related to the COVID-19 pandemic, it would seem that changes to the Polish Electoral Code will be necessary. The adaptation of the new provisions to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of 1997, however, turned out to be too ambitious a task for the domestic legislator. Therefore, the Act of April 6, 2020 on the special rules for holding general elections for the President of the Republic of Poland, ordered in 2020, did not enter into force finally, because the functioning of a democratic state ruled by law requires that fundamental rights and civil liberties, including electoral ones be guaranteed. This study is empirical in nature - it is a case study of a specific legislative action shown in a comparative approach on the example of Poland and the United States of America.

The objective scope of the article includes an analysis of the course and the results of the elections to the parliament in the Autonomous Communities of Galicia and the Basque Country, which took place on July 12, 2020. In Galicia, as the first of the Autonomous Communities, the Spanish government introduced the last phase related to restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, the so-called 'nueva normalidad' (effective from June 15, 2020). This meant that elections in Galicia were held in zone 3 (the so-called green zone from June 8, 2020), in which the lowest level of restrictions was introduced. In the Basque Country, on the other hand, elections were originally scheduled for April 5, 2020. Due to the 'estado de alarma' (state of alert) in force from March 2020, the elections were postponed in both Autonomous Communities. During the analysis, attention was paid to voter turnout and the distribution of votes cast among individual political parties.

The aim of the study is to analyze the issues of midterm and snap elections during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland. In particular, the nature of such elections was considered. Numerous restrictions including, for example, the prohibition of assembling or movement of people, had an impact on the course and implementation of the basic functions of elections. The aim of the paper is also to determine whether, in the light of the applicable regulations, it is permissible to change the date of voting in the ordered local elections during the COVID-19 pandemic. It should be noted that in the period from March to April 2020, and then from November 2020 to June 2021, this practice became almost universal. The resolution of this problem is of significant importance, as each act ordering elections should guarantee the holding of elections within a strictly defined time and, moreover, every action of the proper body should be based on legal provisions. The practice of postponing voting in local elections, which occurred during the pandemic, weakened the so understood (as of a guarantee) nature of the act of ordering elections, at the same time inspiring a discussion on the legal admissibility of such actions. In this study, the formal and legal method was used and the achievements of the doctrine and judicature were analyzed.

In March 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, local elections were held in Bavaria: the first round of voting took place on 15.03.2020 (traditional and postal voting) followed by the run-off ballot on 29.03.2020 (postal voting alone). The political decision to rely solely on postal voting in the second ballot was made unanimously by all the political fractions represented in the Bavarian parliament in the sense of responsibility for public health. The run-off ballot was held in constituencies where voting in the first round did not yield a winner. There were 34 such constituencies out of a total of 96. In this way, a research sample was created embracing the above-mentioned 34 constituencies, randomly and evenly dispersed throughout the entire Bundesland, and a control sample comprising the remaining constituencies. The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis according to which the postal voting held in Bavaria in March 2020, amidst the pandemic, led to an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. The results of this study may be relevant for the discussion that in April and May of 2020 was going on in Poland - and never eventually settled - where public health concerns were raised. The Bavarian example was invoked by both supporters and opponents of postal voting as the sole form of voting in the Polish presidential elections originally scheduled for May of 2020. The Bavarian precedent was instrumentalized as an argument made - respectively in favor or against - sticking to the originally adopted electoral timeline.

As shown by the statistics, East Asian countries control COVID-19 better than other countries. Due to that fact, one should pose the following question: what is it caused by? The article analyzes the actions taken to control COVID-19 in Poland and Malaysia - statistics, the time of introducing restrictions, their types and scope, as well as methods of their enforcement. The choice of countries is dictated by a similar number of inhabitants and the number of tests performed. Malaysia is recognized worldwide as one of the top countries managing the pandemic very well. On the other hand, Poland is one of the world's leading countries with the highest number of confirmed cases of COVID-19. The descriptive and comparative analysis allowed the author to draw conclusions on the factors that determine success in controlling COVID-19. On the basis of the conducted research, previous experiences and developed action plans for contagious diseases as well as cultural and social factors are of the greatest importance.

The article presents possible impact of the housing policy and the housing market on the situation of households during COVID-19. This impact was estimated as relatively small, with at least four levels of constraints with very different generality and scope and nature of the impact. These restrictions relate to the levels of the market paradigm of economic growth, housing policy understood in its strict sense, the positioning of households in complex socio-economic relations, and the investment and construction process. It was assumed that with the indicated restrictions, changes in the housing policy introduced in Poland in 2020 and 2021 and possible market reactions to them can only be considered in terms of the likely impact on households at an unknown time of the impact of the pandemic. Market reactions were illustrated with selected flow quantities regarding the number and investor structure of housing construction projects commenced after the year 2019. The aim of the paper is to signal and illustrate with available data the inadequacy of the current policy and mechanisms of the housing market in Poland. The general method of elaboration is based on querying, analyzing, and evaluating the up-to-date information in this regard from available sources.

Book review: Włodzimierz Anioł (2020): The Third Republic in three stories: around Polish transformations in 1989-2019. The review discusses the content of the book, in particular the setting of the subject matter in the context of the debates over the course of the political transformation that have been going on for years.

The aim of this article is to present an overview of theoretical approaches to public policy. The author focuses on its two phases - design and implementation, not including evaluation. The article is an attempt to answer the following research questions: How do researchers define public policy? What are its phases? What are the characteristics of these phases? How is its implementation defined? And what do top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid approaches mean? What is considered to be an implementation success and what factors influence it? Which direction should future research on public policy processes take? In order to answer the above-mentioned questions, the author has reviewed the subject literature, mainly in English, dealing with the issues of designing and implementing public policies. The article is a synthesis of public policy theories.

The premise of the article is that the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, among others, will highlight the shortcomings in public policies in Poland. It is also assumed that public policies include actions of the authorities towards artists. The status of artists as a target group of public policy in a democratic system is diagnosed as well as the process of creating regulations for the status of a professional artist in Poland is described. The subject of a detailed analysis are the decisions of the Polish government regarding artists in the years 2020-2021. Technical, formal, and media problems of the authorities with the distribution of aid funds for artists in Poland are related to the lack of a law definition of an artist in the Polish social security system, and more broadly, in public policies. Due to the fact that the legislative work on the artist's status has not been completed before the 5th wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, problems in managing public aid for artists in Poland are expected to reoccur.

Youth councils at local government units have existed practically since 1990. However, only since 2001 there has been a legal basis for setting up such bodies. Although this provision remained unchanged, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduced the possibilities of youth councils. They had many problems and in many cases no new term of office was appointed for these bodies. As a result, the Parliament dealt with the statutory regulation of the youth council institution and adopted a government bill in 2021 (Dz.U. 2021 poz. 1038). The author tries to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the number of youth councils in operation. In addition, he assesses the most important solutions contained in the applicable law. Finally, the article welcomes the legislative action but notes the incomprehensible decisions. It also draws attention to the sharp decrease in the number of youth councils between March 2020 and September 2021 but notes the upward trend.

The Greek Civil War of 1946-1949 divided the Greek society into allies of the monarchy and supporters of the Communist Party of the Greece-led Transitional Democratic Government of Free Greece. The military arm of the leftist center was the Democratic Army of Greece. Until some time, the communist forces were actively supported by the countries of the Eastern Bloc: Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. However, the Stalin-Tito conflict, which intensified from 1948 onwards, contributed to the defeat of the Democratic Army of Greece, caused by the overwhelming military advantage of the monarchist forces. In mid-1949, a decision was made to evacuate partisan units and the civilian population that had been under their control to Albania. Also, Poland, a country that suffered greatly as a result of World War II, helped Greece. First, by providing food, military and medical equipment, and later by accepting over 13,000 children and adults, fighters and civilians from the areas covered by the war, all terribly tired of war and wandering. The group of migrants was organized from scratch, provided medical and social care, work, education, and access to culture. Migrations of people in search of shelter from conflicts, persecution, and poverty are not only a contemporary problem of the European Union. This article presents the reforms initiated by the government of the Polish People's Republic as a result of the escalation of the crisis in the Balkans. In Poland refugees from Greece found completely new living, civilization, cultural, geographical, and economic conditions. Gradually, they managed to settle in this foreign country. Today many of them are grateful to Poland for their help.

This article presents conclusions from observation of the first Citizens' Assembly organized in Wrocław (Poland) in 2020. The analysis starts with placing the panel within the most recent developments in a democratic theory followed by an empirical case study based on covert non-participant observation, document analysis and personal interviews. In conclusion, the paper shows that while citizens' assembly is a promising method for engaging citizens in decision-making process, it poses numerous challenges, especially in terms of framing, organizing and moderating the educational and deliberative stages of the process.

The increasing complexity of the social world forces transformations within public policies, which are trying to adapt to the dynamically changing reality. The implementation of new management techniques in line with the model of metagovernance appears to be a common formula of such adaptation. The model involves complementing the existing management models with horizontal networks of public policy stakeholders as well as establishing the policy regarding three principles - of the required diversity, required reflexivity, and ironic attitude. Public cultural institutions that serve the role of framework institutions support the implementation of new management techniques, primarily by means of creating new and supporting existing networks of cultural policy stakeholders. The description of the institution is based on in-dept-interviews with individuals involved in the creation of public policy in the area of culture pursued in the second half of 2018.

The aim of this paper is to indicate how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic may determine the key directions of urban spatial policy in Poland. Therefore, the following aspects have been analyzed: the guidelines arising from the medical point of view (in terms of health policy priorities) and the key theses of the international scientific discussion on changes in urban spatial policies. Based on the above analysis as well as on the indicated current possibilities of planning solutions in Poland, recommendations will be developed on the directional issues of urban spatial policy. The paper will determine to what extent individual postulates can be implemented in the Polish reality. Recommendations developed in this way will reflect a universal dimension - making it possible to refer to the majority of development and spatial documents of Polish cities (in particular development strategies and studies of spatial development conditions and directions). An important contribution of the paper will also be an attempt to take an interdisciplinary approach to the medical and urban planning perspective and translate it into concrete postulates.