Suchergebnisse

Traditionally, and for some good reasons, elections in Communist one-party states have been treated as relatively unimportant phenomena, essentially 'massive demonstrations of ritualized affirmation', or simply a test of the Communist party's mobilization powers. The absence of competing political parties and consequently opposing goals and programmes does clearly mean that such elections are very different from those in liberal democratic states. They do not and cannot, for example, resolve the often crucial question of political succession.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate or to determine the constitutional status of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland in the light of the basic principles of the political system. The position of the lower chamber of the Polish parliament is presented in turn against the backdrop of four principles: the sovereignty of the Nation, political representation, political pluralism, and the separation and balancing of powers. In the context of the latter principle, the relationship between the Sejm and the executive is also presented.

The article discusses the role of the committee in the control function of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland. Committees are one of the key bodies of the Sejm. They perform a significant range of work, both legislative and control. The article discusses the competences of parliamentary committees, highlights the importance of the presence of the most important people in the state at their meetings and indicates the possibilities of increasing the effectiveness of the committee's control activities.

Abstract
Since 2005, a unique project has been under way, which aims to collect all possible descendants of the parliamentary élite of the 18th-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). The project resulted in creating an online database called The Genealogy of Descendants of the Great Sejm, which provides a unique source of information about the genealogical structure of people descending from the 18th-century noble élite of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Drawing on these data, this paper aims to open up new lines of inquiry on the dynamics of homogamy of the Polish nobility by analyzing longer trends of several (e.g. five, eight, or even more) generations of nobles (or nobles' descendants) in Poland over the last two centuries.