The article discusses the outcomes of elections to the European Parliament in Austria in June 2004. Attitudes of relevant Austrian parties towards the European integration project are briefly discussed and placed on the theoretical scale that ranges from "Hard Euroscepticism" and "Identity Europeanism". The presented outcomes of the elections are put into the general context of the Austrian party system and voters' preferences since the middle 1980s. Special attention is given to the phenomenon of Hans-Peter Martin's populist list that won almost 14 % of the vote. Also, relatively low voter turnout is discussed. The Austrian example is very suitable for theorizing European elections as elections of less voters´ attention that is conceptualized at the end of the article.
ParlaMint 2.1 is a multilingual set of 17 comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (from November 1st 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, while the text version is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1432. The ParlaMint.ana linguistic annotation includes tokenization, sentence segmentation, lemmatisation, Universal Dependencies part-of-speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies, and the 4-class CoNLL-2003 named entities. Some corpora also have further linguistic annotations, such as PoS tagging or named entities according to language-specific schemes, with their corpus TEI headers giving further details on the annotation vocabularies and tools. The compressed files include the ParlaMint.ana XML TEI-encoded linguistically annotated corpus; the derived corpus in CoNLL-U with TSV speech metadata; and the vertical files (with registry file), suitable for use with CQP-based concordancers, such as CWB, noSketch Engine or KonText. Also included is the 2.1 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. As opposed to the previous version 2.0, this version corrects some errors in various corpora and adds the information on upper / lower house for bicameral parliaments. The vertical files have also been changed to make them easier to use in the concordancers.
ParlaMint 2.1 is a multilingual set of 17 comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after November 1st 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the ParlaMint TEI-encoded corpora with the derived plain text version of the corpus along with TSV metadata on the speeches. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. Note that there also exists the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, which is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1431.
ParlaMint is a multilingual set of comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after October 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the ParlaMint TEI-encoded corpora with the derived plain text version of the corpus along with TSV metadata on the speeches. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. Note that there also exists the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, which is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1405.
ParlaMint is a multilingual set of comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after October 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, while the text version is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1388. The ParlaMint.ana linguistic annotation includes tokenization, sentence segmentation, lemmatisation, Universal Dependencies part-of-speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies, and the 4-class CoNLL-2003 named entities. Some corpora also have further linguistic annotations, such as PoS tagging or named entities according to language-specific schemes, with their corpus TEI headers giving further details on the annotation vocabularies and tools. The compressed files include the ParlaMint.ana XML TEI-encoded linguistically annotated corpus; the derived corpus in CoNLL-U with TSV speech metadata; and the vertical files (with registry file), suitable for use with CQP-based concordancers, such as CWB, noSketch Engine or KonText. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project.
Samoobrona (Self-Defense) and League of Polish Families (LPR) won the seats in the Sejm in the parliamentary elections in September 2001. Both parties represent radical opposition in the Polish parliament. They critisize Poland´s accession to the EU and the situation in the country after 1989 in general. The following text describes the history of both parties and the cardinal points of their policies. ; Samoobrona (Self-Defense) and League of Polish Families (LPR) won the seats in the Sejm in the parliamentary elections in September 2001. Both parties represent radical opposition in the Polish parliament. They critisize Poland´s accession to the EU and the situation in the country after 1989 in general. The following text describes the history of both parties and the cardinal points of their policies.
Election laws regulate the number of deputies who are elected in individual electoral districts, and set them in relation to the population, respectively to the number of voters participating in elections in individual regions. Elected deputies could thus be regarded as political representatives of citizens living in electoral districts. However, under systems of proportional representation, current deputies represent the ideology of the party to which they belong rather than the region. Nevertheless, it makes sense to study the spatial distribution of the places of origin and residence of members of parliament and their changes over time, because it suggests much about the political system and the system of representative democracy in the country. The spatial distribution of places of residence of candidates and elected members indicates not only the territorial proportionality and geographic representativeness, but also the shifting centers of political power. The analysis clearly confirms the gradual decentralization and regionalization of political power in the country, which stands in contrast to the centralization of power in the economy, this latter trend apparent from the concentration of economic management and decision-making in the largest cities, especially in Prague.
A common initiative of the European Parliament and the European Commission resulted in the unification of the rules governing lobbyists at EU level in June 2011. The aim of this paper is to fill the gap in the literature as regards evaluation of the new system of the EU Transparency Register using the CPI methodology and to generate a numerical value for the scheme for further comparative purposes. Detailed analysis of relevant documents indicates that the current EU scheme's index is 26, which mirrors its supposed low level of stringency. Thorough comparison with past regulatory schemes of the Parliament and Commission reveals that, surprisingly, it is the European Parliament which has made greater steps in lobby regulation, especially towards enhancing transparency in lobbying. Although the new scheme represents a compromise between both institutional approaches, regarding its individual elements, there is a clear dominance of the Commission's approach, which can be regarded as the true leader of reform. ; A common initiative of the European Parliament and the European Commission resulted in the unification of the rules governing lobbyists at EU level in June 2011. The aim of this paper is to fill the gap in the literature as regards evaluation of the new system of the EU Transparency Register using the CPI methodology and to generate a numerical value for the scheme for further comparative purposes. Detailed analysis of relevant documents indicates that the current EU scheme's index is 26, which mirrors its supposed low level of stringency. Thorough comparison with past regulatory schemes of the Parliament and Commission reveals that, surprisingly, it is the European Parliament which has made greater steps in lobby regulation, especially towards enhancing transparency in lobbying. Although the new scheme represents a compromise between both institutional approaches, regarding its individual elements, there is a clear dominance of the Commission's approach, which can be regarded as the true leader of reform.
In this article its author wanted to treat the history and presence of the system constitutional institutions competent for the area of conception, execution and control of security and defence policy of the Czech Republic and also addresses in short the function and content of the main security documents of the country. The author tried to sketch the institutional and documentary framework of the Czech security policy and to explain roles, relations and obligations of the highest-level constitutional bodies in the process of creation and carrying out of this policy (especially positions of the President, the Parliament, the Government and its so called power ministries and other important institutions). This text does not take a lot all this theme in detail, but it is more aimed at basic information and its target is to expound these problems to those interested, especially to foreign students. ; In this article its author wanted to treat the history and presence of the system constitutional institutions competent for the area of conception, execution and control of security and defence policy of the Czech Republic and also addresses in short the function and content of the main security documents of the country. The author tried to sketch the institutional and documentary framework of the Czech security policy and to explain roles, relations and obligations of the highest-level constitutional bodies in the process of creation and carrying out of this policy (especially positions of the President, the Parliament, the Government and its so called power ministries and other important institutions). This text does not take a lot all this theme in detail, but it is more aimed at basic information and its target is to expound these problems to those interested, especially to foreign students.
Název článku věrně vystihuje jeho podstatu – jde o bilancování práve ukončené politické kariéry jeho autora, poslance slovenského parlamentu a dvojnásobného předsedy environmentálního výboru. Dozvíme se, jak proběhl loňský rok 2015, a především, co se v něm dělo za parlamentními zdmi. Text je tak vhledem do způsobu vládnutí (nejen) na Slovensku (a nejen) v uplynulém období – ukazuje, jak rozumné přístupy a řešení vždy podléhají politickému kalkulu. Nejpoctivěji vyznívá osobní krédo Mikuláše Huby, které by se dalo shrnout jako: Pracovat a nebát se, stát si za svým. ; The title of this article precisely captures its essence – it is a review of the political career of its author, member of the Slovak Parliament and twice-chairman of the environmental committee. We learn about last year's events, and especially what was happening inside the walls of the Parliament. The text is also an insight into governance (not exclusively) in the Slovak Republic (and not only) in the recent period – it shows how reasonable approaches and solutions are always subject to political calculus. The honest-sounding personal credo of Mikuláš Huba can be summarized as: To work and not be afraid, to stand up for yourself.
In the Slovak parliamentary elections of 2010, the reformist centre-right parties defeated the left-nationalist coalition government led by Robert Fico. The election results brought some other surprises – the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia and its leader, three-times Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar, as well as the Party of Hungarian Coalition were eliminated from the national parliament. Moreover, the election outcome of the radical right-wing Slovak National Party declined significantly. On the other hand, two new parties entered parliament. All in all, the election outcomes show the weakening of the nationalist agenda and the nationalist vote. The paper examines why this has happened and raises the question of to what extent it is sustainable.
New President of Romania Traian Băsescu is strong-willed to fight corruption which is a potential threat of national security. Fighting corruption, Băsescu and new government must smash through the shield of interposed persons. Such persons are covering "white collars" that are top-ranking businessmen or privatizers close to political parties. That is why new government and new President want to modify existing penal code and to widen criminal liability of involved persons and organized groups. Today's politically motley Parliament wouldn't be able to adopt such legal measures. In this case, President Băsescu, enjoying wide currency and making use of his accumulated electoral capital, will manifestly be leading the country to anticipated elections. By such a step he would provide current main coalition political parties (PD and PNL) with a comfortable majority in Parliament and with an appropriate milieu for adopting new penal code.
ESIC (Europarl Simultaneous Interpreting Corpus) is a corpus of 370 speeches (10 hours) in English, with manual transcripts, transcribed simultaneous interpreting into Czech and German, and parallel translations. The corpus contains source English videos and audios. The interpreters' voices are not published within the corpus, but there is a tool that downloads them from the web of European Parliament, where they are publicly avaiable. The transcripts are equipped with metadata (disfluencies, mixing voices and languages, read or spontaneous speech, etc.), punctuated, and with word-level timestamps. The speeches in the corpus come from the European Parliament plenary sessions, from the period 2008-11. Most of the speakers are MEP, both native and non-native speakers of English. The corpus contains metadata about the speakers (name, surname, id, fraction) and about the speech (date, topic, read or spontaneous). The current version of ESIC is v1.0. It has validation and evaluation parts.
