Демократија у Уставу Босне и Херцеговине
Democracy in the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Author(s): Radomir Lukić
Subject(s): Constitutional Law
Published by: Правни факултет Универзитета у Источном Сарајеву
Keywords: Consociational democracy;Majority democracy;Veto;Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina;Joint institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina;Parliamentary Assembly;Council of Representatives;Council of People
Summary/Abstract: The subject of the paper is an analysis of the provisions on democracy in the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, using a dogmatic and normative legal method. The aim of the paper is to contribute to a decisive conclusion which type of democratic political order is determined by the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina and compare it with the corresponding theoretical model. Most of the elements established by the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina point to the conclusion that the partially modified model of consociational or consensual democracy is established by the Constitution, which is commonly applied in societies with segmented division, i.e. a high degree of social cleavage, and which does not allow for the emergence of a relatively homogeneous society, in order to have avoided the application of the majority democracy, which in such societies leads to the domination of certain segments of society or of certain social groups over another clearly different segments of society, that is social groups, and hence to a certain conflicts with unforeseeable consequences. The author sets up two assumptions: first, that consensual democracy is a theoretical and practically established model of a democratic political order, and, secondly, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is still, due to objective differences among the segments of its population, a divided society, and that the cleavage is ethnical, religious and political. Consequently, the consensual democracy model is still fully compatible with Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the majority democracy is not. The paper emphasizes the representation of the core social segments in the joint institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the mutual veto of these social groups and federalism, as elements of consensual democracy, and the degree of protection of human freedoms and rights as precondition for its realization.

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