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To go in for politics, first of all, you need money. For the last election campaign in the USA it was spent more then 2 bilions of dollars. That fact by itself, speaks very much about different topics, about the relation between money and politics. In Serbia you do not need such a big amount of money, for the election campaign, but all problems about the relation between money and political parties are more obscure than they are in the USA. Bearing in mind that, the organization of the Councill of Europe for the fight against corruption, GRECO in the second evaluation of the situation in Serbia, found that the activity of political parties influences very much on the growth of the corruption. The word is about financing of political parties. That field of social life was completely unregulated for many years and nobody asked the simple question: how did you get money? In the time of Milošević, many political parties were financed from abroad and in the great part of publicity it was considered as something normal, legal, and positive. Because of that it is very difficult to say: it was OK yesterday, but now, today, it is not normal, it is not legal, it is not alowed to be financed from abroad. On the other side, great problem is the problem of sanctions against political parties. The question is how to punish one political party. The political liability and moral sanction are not effective. This article deals also with the problem: who is the owner of the mandate – the political party or the individual, the representative, the member of Parliament. Few years ago, the Serbian Constitutional Court decided that the mandate belongs to individual and not to the political party. That decision is in accordance with European standards, but new phenomenon, problem raises from that – the trading of mandates. There is also the problem of vote-buying – is it something illegal or not? It is legal problem – some kind of a fraud, but the biggest problem is moral problem. Politicians today are in the focus of publicity and it has great implications on the moral situation, on the moral crisis in one society. What is allowed to ordinary people, could not be allowed to politicians, said Aristotel. So, in this article, the author speaks about three groups of problems of political corruption – 1) financing political parties; 2) trading of mandate and vote-buying; 3) the negative influence of politician's behaviour on the social morality and the raising of general corruption.
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The model of electoral list in the proportional electoral system of the Republic of Serbia, which was applied in parliamentary elections until the change in the electoral legislation in 2011, is completely unknown in comparative systems. Pursuant to this model, the voters were obliged to vote for the list as a whole, without being able to express their individual preferences towards any candidate, whereas the political parties enjoyed absolute freedom in the personal distribution or allocation of individual seats by selecting candidates from the electoral list. This regulatory framework has created a deformed content of "free choice" (which is guaranteed to political parties but not to voters); consequently, the system assumed the characteristics of indirect elections. After nearly a decade of applying a surrogate of the closed electoral list in the constitutional system of Serbia, the amendments of the national electoral legislation instituted the traditional model of a closed electoral list, which provides minimum guarantees to citizens in terms of personal choice of representatives and the composition of the National Assembly. However, a new legal solution which stipulates that the mandates shall be allocated according to the established order of candidates on the electoral list may cause unfavorable effects in the proportional electoral system with a single constituency in the Republic of Serbia. In the current circumstances, the applied model of a closed electoral list is inconsistent with the principle of equal electoral rights of citizens because it lays down treacherous grounds for unauthorized entry of various unlawful instruments in the course of candidate nomination.
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Although very important, the Law on Election of Deputies is a plain, not a constitutional law. In the period since 1992. to 2003, this law had a peculiar purpose to enable the juridisation of relation between a deputy and a political party. Instead of the explicit proclamation of free mandate, as an essential principle of constitutional democracy, the Constitution of Serbia of 2006 has created a legal basis for establishing the party imperative mandate (Article 102, paragraph 2). The Law on Altering and Amending the Law on Election of Deputies of 2011, drafted on the basis of recommendations from the Venice Commission, is an attempt to “neutralize“ the bad solution of the Constitution. However, in order to “Gordian Knot“ of the nature of the mandate of deputy loosened, the Constitution must explicitly proclaim the free mandate. Until then, the dillema about the nature of parliamentary mandate in the Republic of Serbia will remain open.
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E-voting is a new and rapidly developing area of policy and technology. Standards and requirements need to keep abreast of, and where possible anticipate, new developments. Common law standards on e-voting, which reflect and apply the principles of democratic elections and referendums to the specificities of evoting, are key to guaranteeing that all the principles of democratic elections and referendums are respected when using e-voting, and thus to building trust and confidence in domestic evoting schemes. The set of standards consists of the legal, operational (mainly relating to organisational and procedural matters) and core technical requirements for e-voting. The legal standards are intended to apply the principles of existing Council of Europe (Recommendation Rec(2004)11 adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 30 September 2004) and other international instruments relating to elections, to e-voting.
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In this paper the author analyses the possibilities of effective participation of national minorities in public affairs through the existing electoral models. The effective participation of national minorities in public affairs in Republic of Serbia is facilitated in two ways - through the affirmative action measures in electoral legislation for all levels of elections, and through self – government (cultural autonomy) of national minorities in the fields of the use of language and script, education, information and culture in which the national minorities are represented by their national councils. The conclusion is that the affirmative action measures ensure the effective political participation of national minorities, especially through removal of electoral threshold for the state and local elections, but they are not uniform, and the result of the combination of majority and proportional elections for the Assembly of Vojvodina can be that national minorities are under or over – represented in that body. The elections for national councils are based on hybrid solution – the combination of direct and indirect elections. That creates the unsustainable model which is not based on the principles of the rule of law and on international or comparative standards of minority protection.
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The paper deals with elections to the European Parliament. The Parliament is composed of 736 Members who represent the second largest democratic electorate in the world (after India) and the largest trans-national democratic electorate in the history (375 million eligible voters in 2009).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament - cite_note-2 The Parliament has been directly elected every five years by universal suffrage since 1979. After introductory notes with regard to the development of the European Parliament, the first part of the article is dedicated to the legislation regulating the EP elections. While there are some pieces of EUlevel legislation, the elections are still administrated according to each EU Member State’s Rules, making the EP elections 27 different nationally administrated elections to a supra-national assembly. The special attention is paid to the number of seats in the EP. The seats are distributed according to "degressive proportionality", meaning that the larger the state, the more citizens that are represented per Member of the EP. In the second part of the article the author analyses European Political Parties and Political Groups. Members of the EP are organized into seven different parliamentary groups, including non-attached Members known as non-inscrits. The two largest groups are the European People's Party (EPP) and the Socialists & Democrats (S&D). The third part of the article is dedicated to the Election campaigns and Awareness- Raising by the European Political Parties. Within the concluding observations, the author sums up presented observations and especially emphasizes the importance of increasing voter turnout.
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In each country, based uponon a democratic legitimacy of the authority which "pumps" through free and fair elections, a special structure of bodies competent to conduct the elections is appearing (electoral bodies). They are now often defined as one of the forms of “the authority of fourth power", and their number, structure, nature and competences depend on different national legislations. In Serbia, electoral bodies are numerous and depend on the internal territorial organization of Serbia and on the elections which are called for. In Serbia, but worldwide as well, these bodies are often called "the election administration”. The question that appears is whether this name is justified and whether it can or should be used. If we start from the "functions", i.e. from the work and activities of the state administration bodies according the present legal framework in Serbia, it becomes clearer that the electoral bodies are conducting the executive, professional and often the other activities of the state administration bodies. In this context, from the standpoint of the functional concept of the administration in a theoretical sense, which considers the "administrative bodies" as all entities that perform administrative activities, there is justification for the use of the term "the election administration", although this term, as well as the term public administration, is not positive-legal concepts in the Republic of Serbia.
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