Around the Bloc: Around the Bloc - Georgian Presidential Election Goes to Runoff
The next president will have reduced powers as country transitions to a parliamentary system
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The next president will have reduced powers as country transitions to a parliamentary system
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Led by a popular gay politician, Wiosna’s liberal platform might still have a shot in the conservative, Catholic country.
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Political discourse is a form of exercising socio-political fundamental rights. Candidates, governors or opponents, on all the meridians and within the majority of political regimes, seem to value more the performative side of discourse, to convince voters, then as an action line that should be followed either and only in the form of diligence, if not the result. The legitimate question is whether political discourse can generate legal relationships and, therefore, to forms of legal liability, or whether it "escapes" the field and remaining exclusively in a volatile context, limited to a monologue or eventually dilatory dialogue with the perspective of dissolution after a first audience effect.
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More and more researchers focus on the role of social networks in election campaigns. This article represents a case study of the parliamentary elections from 2015 in Spain and 2016 in Romania, with the aim of comparing the two online political campaigns. We describe how both parties in Romania and Spain used Facebook during the last parliamentary elections, in order to see how the political parties, communicate and the online reactions generated by their messages. With the help of content and statistical analysis we take a closer look the messages published in the Facebook profiles of candidates and political parties during the general elections. The results indicate that, during parliamentary elections, unlike the presidential ones, the voters' attention is not directed to a candidate, but to a group of candidates. As a result, the communication strategy is different, focusing on increasing the notoriety of the candidates. The low interest in parties and parliamentary elections leads to using social networks mainly for disseminating information about the candidates and less as tool for mobilizing voters.
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Functioning of political parties and electoral campaigns is determined by internal legal norms and by international acts. Legal regulation of political party financing and electoral campaigns is one of the key factors to ensure a fair and objective electoral process. These funding within a country must be transparent, regardless of the level of social, political, economic, cultural development, etc. Western Balkan countries have regulated this issue in their own way. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the relationship between public and private financing of political parties and electoral campaigns is not clearly regulated. On the other hand, in Croatia, the expenditures of services in electoral campaigns are not clearly regulated. In Kosovo, the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns is made by the political force that the political party had in the previous elections. In Serbia to cover election spending, the state allocates the sum of 0.07%. In Montenegro and Macedonia, these funds are more precise. Otherwise, in Albania the funding of electoral campaigns is determined by the Electoral Code. The main purpose of this research is to analyze and evaluate political parties and electoral campaigns in Western Baltic. The methodology used in this study is comparative research as it covers countries in Balkans. Through this research we conclude that state bodies in these countries need to do more to increase the transparency of these financial expenses and punish those who exceed legal limits.
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Local Governance considers it as one of the basic values of democratic achievements and of particular importance of the political system in general, in this paper are highlighted the common and differences of the Local Government of the Republic of Macedonia and the Republic of Kosovo, two states these, who for decades had lived together in Yugoslavia. Since the early 1990s, Macedonia has been a country of its own and has all the attributes of independence. Meanwhile, Kosovo became independent from Serbia on February 17, 2008. Thus, through interpretations of the applicable laws and other legal documents that regulate or claim a more advanced Local Government, a comparative look will be highlighted in the main segments constitute the Local Government in these two countries? Based on legal documents, as well as the literature that had the Local Governance topic or mentioned this topic, reveal the common and local differences between the two countries.
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We investigate attitudes toward voting reforms that attribute greater weight to younger generations in a survey experiment. The main assumption of this research is that due to the distortions caused by elite discourse, voters are not aware of the intergenerational inequality of redistribution, thus attempts to change the voting system – that currently provides an equal vote to each voter, thereby maintaining inequality – would not get suffi cient public support. After providing a review of potential voting reforms for improving intergenerational justice, we present results from an online survey sample of one thousand respondents. The data show that presenting the arguments for intergenerational justice increases the sensitivity of younger voters towards the political rights of young generations, but does not improve the acceptance of such reforms among the middle-aged and the elderly.
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Until recently the Irish party system has been considered as very stable. It was dominated by two rival conservative political parties. which only in the 1990s allowed the possibility of forming coalition governments with other parties. In 2011 there was a historical change – for the first time since 1932 Fianna Fáil lost the parliamentary elections with the worst result in history. However. the classical parameters of the dynamics of party systems did not adequately reflect this transformation. In the article. we argue that without taking into account significant socio-cultural changes. the method of system analysis. focused on data obtained on the basis of election results. remains an insufficient tool to describe the Irish party system. We reconstruct the most important events related to the evolution of this system between 2011 and 2016 and try to answer the question of how relevant political parties reacted to changing patterns of competition.
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The article is an attempt to present proposals for two election campaign models – presidential and parliamentary. In the journalistic and political science language, the terms ‘presidential marketing’ and ‘parliamentary marketing’ are frequently used, but literature and scientific articles lack wider theoretical reflection on these categories. This text in no place aspires to create the only and universally applicable concept. The author’s intention is to present his own proposal and subject it to scientific discussion. The starting point for building this proposal were the most common concepts in the world literature (‘candidate in the election campaign’, ‘comprehensive political marketing’, ‘evolution of election campaigns’ and ‘concept of contemporary election campaign models’), but mainly based on the proposal of Marek Jeziński, who over dozen years ago presented models shots of the presidential, parliamentary and self-governmental campaign. The “presidential model” dichotomy – the “parliamentary model” is based on the following criteria: (1) political system conditions, (2) election aim and winner issue (3) nominations of candidates, (4) main campaign product, (5) electoral strategy and (6) the presentation of the campaign in mass media.
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The European Union today faces difficult challenges. Numerous political, economic, social, cultural and identity issues in the European Union have not been treated satisfactorily, causing direct consequences in its political life. More and more citizens are unhappy with the way in which the current political elite of the European Union responds to these challenges, while the opposition political parties (whether left-wing or right-wing center parties) do not offer a significantly different alternative. For these reasons, over the past two decades, the European Union has gradually revived the political right-wing. Whether it's a new right-wing center, far right-wing or an extreme right-wing - a new wave of the right-wing gives citizens of the Union an authentic alternative policy. It is about parties that are ready to deal with the problems of migration, culture, religion, identity, as well as the integration of minorities into the European model of life. Although still media-satanized and labeled as a fascist or Nazi, the European right-wing year after year is stronger - from Hungary, through Slovakia, Poland, Germany and Austria, all the way to the Netherlands and Great Britain. The ruling political elite in Brussels called the wave of the rise of the right-wing in the Union a " false alarm", while the relevant data from the previous election cycles of the same, as well as public opinion polls show a completely opposite tendency - the desire of a large part of the citizens to create "New Europe".
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This paper examines the institutional conditions of the Serbian society for existing of the competition of political ideas and visibility of different political options in the public sphere. In the first part, two phases of the Regulatory Agency for Elec tronic Media (REM) in Serbia are identified. First, period from its establishment in 2003 until the adoption of media laws in 2014, and second, from 2014 onward. In the first phase, REM almost exclusive ly dealt with election campaigns, despite having many other topics to regulate by adoption of bylaws (such as protection of minors, copyright and other). In its second phase, especially during the Presidential elec tion campaign in 2017, REM suddenly decided not to monitor the work of providers of audiovisual media services, but to react to complaints instead. The official ratio behind it was that there were no sanctions prescribed under the Law on Electronic Media, but also that the Law on Elections of Members of Parliament should deal with the media during electoral campaign. In the second part, the opposite interpretation of the Law on Electronic Media (LEM) is offered. Article 47, Para 1, Point 5. pre scribes that there should be “equal representation without discrimina tion to registered political parties, coalitions and individual candidates during the election campaign”. Further on, Article 28 of LEM introduc es measures for REM to enforce when providers of audiovisual services breach the rule of equal representation without discrimination. Those are rejection of the application for extension of the licence for offering of audiovisual services and not-issuing of the licence when in doubt that the provider of audiovisual services would not fulfil obligations related, among others, to equal presentation without discrimination of political actors during the election campaign. The final part of the research concludes that institutionalized conditions in Serbia do not allow competition of political ideas. It also determines that the role of the entire society, together with political elites, should be to strengthen independent institutions that monitor the work of the media, especially during election campaigns. To conclude, the proper regulation of media scene and imple mentation of such a regulatory framework has traditionally been com pleted when under pressure from abroad, only. The first drive was given by Council of Europe (CoE), for media laws passed in 2002 and 2003, as their adoption was one of the requirements for Serbia to become the CoE Member State. After Serbia has become the one, European Union has taken over the carrot and stick, so that major media documents, such as Media Strategy in 2011 or new package of media laws in 2014, were adopted as preconditions for Serbia to make a step forward on its European path. Therefore, shall we expect that the regulatory authori ty becomes a strong and independent Regulator, only when Serbia be comes close enough to its EU membership, so that such a body remains one of the prerequisites for Serbia to become the full member of the European Union?
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The aim of this paper is to identify the elements of the political image of the world that the electoral actors in Serbia have been trying to develop through mass political communication from the re-establishment of the multiparty system to the present day. The author of the paper decided to accomplish the given goal by examining the application of basic psychological mechanisms of forming and maintaining the image of the world in creation of electoral posters. The research was approached from the point of social psychology using a constructivist approach. The basic method used in the research is a qualitative content analysis. The selection of posters was preceded by the determination of the so-called situation context factors – the socio-political circumstances in which the posters were created, which is related to the character of the basic method of research. Election campaigns, understood as the final stage in the long-term strategy of the propaganda performances of political actors, were taken as the basic contextual framework for the interpretationof what the communicator sought to say through the posters. The analysis of the posters used in the election campaigns run in 1997, 2000 and 2016 was carried out. The results of the analysis showed that, regarding the application of psychological mechanisms in creation of the “image of the world,” the election poster in Serbia is complex. The conclusion is that the political “image of the world” of voters in Serbia created during the 1990s is similar to their current view of the political environment and that its basic characteristics are the identification with the state and pronounced stereotype of a strong leader.
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The author looks at the complex Austrian electoral system and its political implications for the party system and for the legislative and executive powers. With the reform of the electoral legislation in the Second Republic, which introduced preferential voting and closed and nonblocked lists, voters got the right to give a preference vote to one of the candidates on the list they voted for. This, however, did not bring significant improvements in terms of more personalized election and political representation. In almost thirty years (1959-1990), only one candidate was elected to Parliament thanks to preferential votes, and few have managed to do so since. The author believes that attempts at personalizing election and political representation have failed because the electoral system is fraught with institutes and mechanisms that do not encourage such personalization strongly enough, such as optional preferential voting, too high quota of preference votes for a candidate to be elected, "technical" difficulties in implementing preferential voting at province level, as well as voters' reluctance to overcome such difficulties. On top of that, political parties have got centralized and exclusive parliamentary election candidate selection procedures, where the party leadership plays a crucial role, thus encouraging candidates to give precedence to the party campaign, instead of using a personalized one.
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Wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. Political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake. That is partly the case due to a lack of conceptual clarity when it comes to capturing the effects of war with reliable data. This article systematises and evaluates the attempts at modelling the consequences of war in political science research which relies on quantitative methods. Our discussion is organised around three levels of analysis: individual level of voters, institutional level of political parties, and the aggregate level of communities. We devote particular attention to modelling the legacies of the most recent wars in Southeast Europe, and we offer our view of which efforts have the best potential to help set the foundations of a promising research programme.
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The paper examines distinctiveness of war veterans compared to general population in Croatia according to three important political phenomena: political participation, party preferences and ideological self-identification. Analysis of sociological survey conducted in 2015 shows that there is no difference in the level of political participation measured by voting turnout in 2011 and 2015 parliamentary and 2015 presidential level between Croatian war veterans and the rest of the public. On the other side, war veterans differ from the rest of the electorate, with other variables held constant, in terms of party preferences and ideological self-identification. Compared to non-veterans, war veterans are more inclined to vote for the right and center-right parties and position themselves to the right side of the political spectrum. The paper discusses these differences, as well as its roots and consequences.
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Dosad smo naglasili da rasprava o izbornim sistemima i njihovim političkim učincima ne teče bez poznavanja tehničkih pojedinosti o oblikovanju izbornih sistema. Mnoga nerazumijevanja i razlike u ocjeni rezultiraju pak iz nedostatka općeprihvatljiva konceptualnog okvira i jedinstvenog pojmovlja.
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Elections imply mass political participation, a type of collective decision through which preferences are being communicated to the political leaders The elections in Croatia were conditioned by the historical circumstances (changing the political set-up), as well as by the type of voting rights, election regulations, and persons involved in the electoral process. The outcome of the elections was such that the political spectrum in Croatia acquired a bi polar and asymmetrical shape within which the smaller political parties of the centre have only minor importance. The multy-party parliamentary elections in Croatia are an initial presupposition for the establishment of a democratic order which also means that they restore a legitimate topic of research to political science.
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The author briefly traces a possible direction in which European institutions might develop on the basis of existing traditions of federations of states and of bourgeois democracy of representatives. Assuming that the Community succeeds in integrating political processes on a supernational level and if Parliament should effectuate greater control and introduce legislative competences it might eventually grow into a House of Nations belonging to a representative body consisting of two houses, while the Council might become the House of States as it has already been suggested at an early occasion. In that case there would be nothing to prevent the Commission from assuming the functions of an executive body fully responsible to Parliament. Its present supernational character would be helpful at that point. Such changes would bring the federalization of Europe to its completion. For the time being only a minor number of proposals leading in that direction has been implemented. So far the member-states have not appeared to be ready to accept the European parliament as a legislative body of representatives in a full sense.
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The study of voting and elections as political institutions and political processes has had a long history in the political science of Finland. This can he testified by a plethora of results concerning various aspects of this research topic. The author discusses only one yet important and delicate question concerning election law. namely the system of proportional representation in the Finnish political system. It involves the manner in which parliamentary seals are distributed among political parties and its consequences for the stability and effectiveness of the representative government's activity.
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Research on transformation of German political arena has been quite intensive over the last years. Several general trends could be observed in last decades, but acceleration of more significant changes was seen especially in regard with the political consequences of migration and refugee crisis. The 2017 German parliamentary elections led to a confirmation of a new political reality in Germany and some unexpected results in modern post-war German history. As an outcome of the 2017 elections six political parties entered Bundestag in 2017. The winner, conservative Union of the CDU/CSU, achieved strongest electoral result with 32.9% of the casted votes, but both large parties (CDU/CSU and SPD) were politically weakened and experienced one of the lowest electoral results since their establishment. Fragmentation of political scene, weakening of traditional large political parties, success of new party (AfD), and the return of the traditional political party (FDP) into the German parliament, complicated political relations on the left side of German political spectrum and ruled out simple post-election coalition negotiations. These eventually led to the historically longest government building process of 4th Merkel's government that lasted 171 calendar days. Hence, the study provides an analysis of the campaign, outcome of the parliamentary elections, its interpretations in the context of German, European political development and their impact on German politics. The revival of the Great coalition was reflected in the promotion of some new domestic policies and a support for continuity of the German foreign and European policy. The recent dynamics led to a stabilization of internal situation in both CDU and CSU, ideological crisis of SPD, brought reinforcement of Green party and confirmed fragmentation of German political scene into six relevant political parties which will represent the most important political forces for the next German parliamentary elections.
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