Around the Bloc: No Clear Favorite Ahead of Croatian Elections
Migration and the economy are dominating the campaigns of the governing center-left coalition and opposition HDZ party.
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Migration and the economy are dominating the campaigns of the governing center-left coalition and opposition HDZ party.
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Newcomer party could play kingmaker role when consultations resume.
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An Albanian-born New Jersey man admitted last week to making an illegal donation to the Obama camp
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The Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) won a resounding victory last week in parliamentary elections after an economic downturn in recent years.
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Mixed electoral systems belong to the third, different from plurality/majority electoral systems and proportional representation, type of electoral systems. Although originally they were considered a useful tool for achieving entirely opposing principles of representation, consequently they have created a completely new entity which cannot be reduced to the sum of results produced by their majoritarian and PR components. This thesis is also supported both by their origins, aims, mechanics, number of variants and specific technical solutions within mixed electoral systems. However the main justification of the thesis stems from different political consequences generated by mixed electoral systems as far as the strategy of nominating party candidates, voting behaviour, degree of disproportionality and fragmentation of party system are concerned.
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The aim of this article is to assess the effectiveness of personal strategies applied by Polish political parties during the election to the European Parliament in 2014. Personal strategies ought to be understood as conscious choice of candidates and their proper placement on electoral lists, which is supposed to influence the final result of the election. The article focuses on five committees whose representatives were chosen to become Members of the European Parliament. The assessment of the effectiveness was performed by the confrontation of the strategy assumption and the results of given candidates. Personal strategies made one of several factors that decided of the minimal victory of Civil Platform over Law and Justice. This was due to the fact that the former party took advantage of certain political marketing activities. As regards the remaining committees, the personal strategies they applied had little impact on the election results. However, it is reasonable to claim that without any strategies at all, their results would have been worse, particularly in case of Democratic Left Alliance – Labor Union and Polish People's Party.
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We perform statistical analysis of results of local elections, which took place in Poland in November 2014. Investigating data concerning voivodeship sejmik (provincial-level assembly) we studied correlations between participation in elections, percentage of invalid votes and results of a given party. Furthermore, the frequency, with which a given digit appeared in the numbers provided by the electoral commission was analyzed and compared with the law of Benford. Our results did not reveal significant statistical irregularities, which could possibly confirm an allegated electoral fraud. However, our investigations do confirm the “first page” effect: as in these elections several-page brochures were used as ballot papers, the party which started with number one and their candidates were listed in the first page of the ballot paper had a substantial advantage over the competitors.
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This article is abort the rights of electors in election campaign. His topic is important, but the scientists are not very interested in it. The Author seeks the source of those rights in Polish Constitution: in Article 2 (the rule that Republic of Poland shall be a democratic state ruled by law), Article 4.1, which states, that supreme power in the Republic of Poland shall be vested in the Nation, Article 54 (the freedom to express opinions, to acquire and to disseminate information) and Article 62 (the right to vote). The Author distinguishes: the right to be informed about the candidates and their election platforms, the right to express opinions and needs, the right to participate in election campaign and the right to make a decision alone, in calmness.
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In this article the author analyzes the procedure of submission of lists of candidates for deputies to the Sejm and for senators to the Senate regarding the principle of free elections and other democratic standards. Considering that generally election code regulations fulfill these standards, he also indicates some disadvantages in Code regulations. These defects relate primarily required number of at least 5,000 signatures of voters who permanently reside in a given electoral constituency to submit lists of candidates to the Sejm in that constituency and 2,000 signatures for registering a candidate for senator. The author also critically refers to the legally required number of candidates on the constituency lists in the elections to the Sejm. The number of candidates for deputies to the Sejm submitted by the constituency list may not be lower than the number of seats in that constituency. Electoral committees of smaller political parties and election committees of voters in practice have problems with fulfilling this condition. Another imperfections of the Code is lack of procedure for judicial review of decisions of the election administration to refuse to register the list and also the difficulty of effectively verifying the authenticity of signatures of voters supporting the submission of lists of candidates.
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The article depicts recall election in US legal orders and practice. It also regards some fundamental questions concerning constitutionality of recall – like a right of public officer to remain the seat full period of the term, representativeness and republican form of government.
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The author undertakes to discuss the problem of rivalry strategies of political parties in elections to the Citizens’ Assembly of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. The broadness and multidimensional character of the subject area requires moving beyond the limits of political science and entering other related domains, like broadly-conceived historical sciences, also reaching for a number of establishments within legal-historical domains. Firmly grounded historical, legal, polity-related and political aspects of the unification of Germany in the context of German federalism, encouraged and obligated the author, to attempt to bring the above problem up to date. I think that thanks to a broader analysis of elections to the Hamburg Citizens’ Assembly over the last 50 years, the real state of the problem area can acquire a fuller context, with an emphasis on the foundations of local government functioning. To prepare this paper I made use of Polish and German sources published by Polish, American and German researchers. Polish and German literature offered a valuable source to become acquainted with the history and the foreseeable future of Hamburg’s local government, in particular – the assumptions behind territorial and functional reforms, the evolution of which we have been able to follow in the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1970s.
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The embarrassing e-mails play into the hands of Donald Trump, as some see yet another indication that Russia is actively supporting the Republican candidate.
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In this discussion I’d like to draw attention to one of the basic constitutional principles, i.e. the principle of equality which, in my opinion, is not observed in elections to legislative bodies of local government unit. As far as I am concerned the elections to district councils being the cities with district (poviat?) rights and district (poviat) councils and regional parliaments due to the method of counting the votes to seats do not meet the criterion of equality because there is the counting of the votes cast to constituencies and not to individual local government authorities. Striving after full respecting of the constitutional principle of citizens’ equality should, in my opinion, lead to necessary changes in the electoral system, that is, treating the whole local government unit as really one body to which there are elections and the change of distribution of seats between the eligible electoral committees according to the rules binding in the elections to the European Parliament
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Star Wars characters make unsuccessful runs in local and regional elections.
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In this work, the author will deal with the nature of the political regime of Bosnia andHerzegovina. Attention will be given to institutional arrangements and their evolution in post-Dayton period, in order to answer the following questions: 1) what is the nature of the political regime; 2) what conditions it; 3) where can we see the limitations of the democratic potential of the political regime, and how to overcome these limitations. The work will be based on the following hypotheses. First, Bosnia and Herzegovina is defined as a democratic country by its constitution, but the model of democracy is based on the competitive-elitist democracy, in the form of consociation, which does not create the opportunities for effective participation of citizens in decision-making processes. Democracy,based on the struggle of national political elites, remains strictly indirect and political. Other spheres of life, such as the economy, are not democratized in the least. The author will analyze the possibility of enriching democracy in the political sphere (direct democracy).The second hypothesis will concern the institutional system of Bosnia and Herzegovina,which is structured so that the political institutions serve as a place of negotiation of the national political elites. While such nature of political institutions is largely conditioned by the nature of society and the historical and political circumstances at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, there was a partial evolution of the institutional system since 2000, although its nature is essentially not changed. The merger of national and civil in the functioning of the political institutions has not been achieved, although this would be the optimal solution.
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This paper elaborates the genesis of the establishment and development of political pluralismin Bosnia and Herzegovina starting from the hypothesis that the power of the ruling ethnicparties did not allow the building of consensus in the adoption of laws necessary for the development of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the post-Dayton period. Three ethnic parties: SDA, HDZ and SDS, after winning the first multiparty elections in1990, based the exercise of authority by the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s on the principle of partnership, and not on the democratic principle of establishing a coalition political agenda for the exercise of power in the won mandate. The partnership between the parties in government took place on matters where there was mutual consent. In the first post-war elections, held in September 1996, the same three ethnic parties won again: SDA, HDZ BiH and SDS, with 86% of votes of the electorate. Ethnic parties thus again after thewar gained the dominant power in the entity parliaments and the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to which the constitutional structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina defined in Dayton also contributed. In Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina they applied thispower in the form of partnership in government. What lacked was the determination of the coalition agreement and the political program of the coalition as the indispensable basis forconsensus in the adoption of laws. As a result, in the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia andHerzegovina there was no consensus between the ruling parties on the most important issuesfor the development of the state of BiH. It was not possible to strengthen the power of the Parliament and to develop parliamentary democracy. Laws promulgated by the OHR enabled major reforms in the process of integration of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the European Union. Instead of the power of the Parliament, we see the power of party elites. Instead of parliamentary democracy, we see partitocracy.
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Civil society and its consciousness must have their economic and social basis. There mustbe what is called “the middle class”. There is no middle class in Bosnia and Herzegovina, society is socially divided between the narrow circle of the tycoon-political oligarchy and the vast majority of impoverished people, without jobs and living at minimum of existence. Inequalities – financial and social – in Bosnia and Herzegovina are vast, and the factor thatenlarges them is the present discrimination (territorial, status, marginalized groups, etc.). The absence of the middle class is one of the reasons for the lack of democracy in our country.These are not economic and social conditions that allow the development of civil society. This on the other hand are the conditions for ideological and political manipulation of national or civic identity. For important, positive changes in BiH, development of civil society is an important prerequisite, especially the awareness that government serves the citizens, and not that they “need”the government just to maintain. The best way to achieve this is to learn the lessons, change the approach, first of all through support to policies to strengthen the real private sector and the permeation of civil and national identity. This is a good recipe against nationalism and“production” of national conflicts. Regardless of – in principle – good intentions, support to the development of civil society by international organizations gave very weak results.This “glass is nearly empty.” One of the main reasons are focusing on non-governmental organizations, with the neglect of other important “sectors” of civil society – unions, religious communities, academia, etc. It seems that these have been left to the party influences and manipulations.
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The article shows the influence of territorial division and the existing electoral law on voting behaviors, as well as on electoral outcomes. The analysis was made on the case of the malopolskie voivodeship. The structure of this Polish province is highly diversified. The study involved the elections to regional councils from the years 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014. Their results show that there is a visible increase in the number of votes for those candidates who win seats in the council.
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The article mostly focuses on verification of the impact of the number of termsof a person continuously holding a local executive office (from 2002) on communes' percentage increase of income per capita in 2013 in comparison to 2003 and on the level of socio-economic development of the communes in 2013. The obtained results suggest among others that the communes where the executive authority has been exercised by the same person for three or four terms (from 2002) have higher values of the analysed variables.
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