Suchergebnisse

Critical political science represented by the Marburg school in Germany, has focused on the gap between constitutional norms and political reality. Agnoli criticises this school for presupposing that the norms are good in themselves and for its reformist optimism. He argues that the effect of the political economy of reforms is to safeguard political power against social emancipation.

Abstract
The article analyses how the features of modern political representation have developed in Spanish constitutional history from a multidisciplinary perspective (political philosophy, political science, constitutional law and literature). Between the eighteenth- to the twentieth-century, indeed, the Kingdom of Spain experienced transformations in the concepts of sovereignty, periodic suffrage, free public opinion, and the free and non-revocable mandate. The article also takes into account how the evolution of concepts at stake affected the evolution of the others.

The process of democratization in Benin has been praised as a model for the whole of francophone Africa. Initiated by an independent National-Conference the process of democratic renewal started with a bloodless coup of representatives of different groups of the civil society. Declared aims of this conference were, to guarantee basic human rights, to substitute the "Marxist" Kérékou-Regime by a democratic elected government, and to draft a new liberal-democratic constitution. Officially, each of these aims had been reached within one year. The new constitution was adopted through a referendum by a large majority of the population in December 1990. In the following four years the formal constitutional political structures, meant to guarantee the balance of power were implanted. However, the political elite which dominated the democratization process pursued a hidden agenda. Moreover, the liberalization of society and economy, propagated by the international donor community, had ambiguous effects. The growth of the market economy had it repercussions not just within the realm of the economy, e.g. privatisation, separation of factors of production, land, labour, and capital; creation of business- and professional organizations. The transformation from subsistence into a market-economy was equally important concerning restructuring the political landscape. The adoption of democratic concepts by the population, based on neo-liberal concepts of exchange of equivalents via the market, the notion of equal legal status of all citizens, equal competition of politicians and political parties, and achievement-orientation, led to high flying expectations, but at the same time to a commercialization of social and political relations, including venality. Besides, democratization in Benin - the cradle of "vodun" - was neatly interwoven with the realm of occult belief systems.

AbstractThis article identifies and conceptualizes the structural features of the Party-state and proposes a "dual normative system" as a framework to interpret the constitutional reality of China. This framework has four components: (1) structural integration of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP or the Party) and the state; (2) reserved delegation of authority to the state; (3) bifurcation of state decision-making processes; and (4) cohabitation of the two normative systems: one of the Party and one of the state. This article demonstrates that the political reforms in China since the 1980s have not separated the power of the Party and the state, but have created an increasingly institutionalized dual normative system that is more complex compared with the previous fused system, yet more pliable to adjustments and more open to different interpretations, including to that of the "Party-state constitutionalism", which interprets the "rule of law" as compatible with the rule of the Party.

Annotation

1. Introduction -- 2. National parliaments in the European Union -- 3. The institutional and procedural logic of the early warning system -- 4. The material scope of the early warning system : subsidiarity and other criteria -- 5. The early warning system as an accountability mechanism -- 6. The early warning system as legal review : national parliaments as councils of state -- 7. National parliaments in the constitutional reality of the early warning system.