Suchergebnisse

In an era where millions of people live elsewhere than their country of birth and many hold multiple nationalities, the questions of who and how represents these people becomes imperative. The traditional manner of representation is through political parties, yet the form in which parties have historically existed is within state bounds. Throughout time, we have witnessed the transition from cadre to cartel parties and through them the changing role of the political party. This article argues that with the vast expansion of the movement of people around the world, which has been influenced by the enlargement of the European Union, by globalisation, migration and most recently by the refugee crisis, political parties are reshaping their structures both domestically and internationally, and we are witnessing the development of a 'new modus operandi' of political parties—the party abroad. The party abroad is viewed as a natural evolvement of the functions of domestic political parties in their response to a changing civil society and changing competitive space. The article provides a theory of the party abroad, it discusses how it relates to previous models of political parties and offers a framework based on which we can study it.

On the crossroads between preserving a nationalist rhetoric and adding ways in which it can offer an alternative to mainstream politics, the Slovak Radical Right has transformed itself from having an unsteady presence in parliament over the last two decades to having two nationalist parties with a significant portion of seats. This article examines the radical right parties' (RRPs') gender rhetoric and parliamentary activity, and in comparison to other parties evaluates the substantive representation of women within these parties. The study covers the period from 2006 to 2016 and shows that while women are still significantly outnumbered in RRPs, they are more active on women's issues than any of their counterparts. Moreover, their activity can be characterized as "positive representation," as opposed to the usually assumed "negative representation" of women by RRPs.

Reflecting upon recent political events, attention toward political legitimacy has been renewed within political science debate. However, the concept remains rather broad and elusive with few attempts to find a common way to measure it. An increasing number of scholars have recently examined the link between party regulation and political legitimacy. Building on this research, the current paper explores the role of regulation in legitimizing power. In particular, this project studies how rules endorse leaders. The paper discusses extant measurements of legitimacy and offers a new one. The new measure, Executive Legitimizing Index (ELI), is based on content analysis of constitutional texts in 30 European democracies and emphasizes the power that regulations give to the public to control the executive branch. The paper develops the index both conceptually and empirically and shows that there are significant differences in executive regulation among four pre-defined groups of democracies.

Als relativ neue Demokratie sieht sich Bulgarien einer Reihe Herausforderungen gegenüber; dazu gehört etwa die Schwierigkeit politisch stabile Bedingungen für die weitere ökonomische Entwicklung des Landes sowie seine Rolle in der Europäischen Union herzustellen. Nach wie vor übt Rußland großen Einfluß auf Bulgarien aus; gleichzeitig gibt es verstärkte Ambitionen das Land mehr nach Westen zu orientieren. Als Konsequenz ergaben die Wahlen in 2014 ein parteipolitisch äußerst fragmentiertes Parlament. Dennoch argumentiert dieser Beitrag, dass dieses Ergebnis das Ende der dominanten Rolle der ehemals kommunistischen Partei (jetzt BSP) bedeuten könnte; trotz politischer Turbulenzen in der Gegenwart könnte daraus eine stärkere und mehr nach Westen orientierte Regierung resultieren.

It has been theoretically and empirically shown that ideological diversity complements the effect of institutions on the development of party systems and the number of political parties that ensue. Thus, students of party and electoral systems now commonly employ ethnic fractionalization as an indicator of ideological differences; however, there is no unilaterally agreed upon data set that scholars use. In addition, extant data sets measure heterogeneity at the national level, rather than at the district level, where electoral competition takes place and where both institutional and social factors matter most. Using a multi-level empirical analysis, this article illustrates the interactive effect of the two main district characteristics - magnitude and heterogeneity - on the number of parties. It demonstrates the analytical benefit of using district-level characteristics in explaining party system size and aims to reduce the data gap by providing a district-level ethnic heterogeneity data set for 18 European states. Adapted from the source document.

While many works have empirically studied the number of parties, little has been done to investigate the difference between theoretical predictions and empirical reality. Furthermore, the bulk of the analyses on party system development are carried out with national data, as opposed to studying electoral competition at the level where it occurs - the constituency. This article offers a comparative study of the determinants of party system convergence of twenty European democracies, explaining why party systems in new democracies are much further away from the theoretically predicted equilibrium than those in more established states. The main argument is that learning the effect of institutions is integral to understanding the number of competing parties and it takes time for political elites in new democracies to learn. Using a hierarchical model, the study shows the effect of age of democracy on party system convergence and illustrates that it is more pronounced in new democracies. The analysis demonstrates further that pre-electoral constraints such as signature and deposit requirements have a significant positive effect on party system convergence, while public funding, contrary to previous speculations, is found to be insignificant. Adapted from the source document.