De Europese programma's van Fianna Fail, FDF-RW en Volksunie : Een gemene noemer voor Ierse nationalisten en Belgische federalisten ?

Res Publica ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-113
Author(s):  
Joan Hart ◽  
Bruno De Witte

The article compares the attitude of the Irish Fianna Fait, the Flemish Volksunie, and the coalition of the Rassemblement Wallon and the Francophone Brussels' PDF, towards Europe and their programmes for the European elections.These parties do not define themselves on a socio-economic or religious basis, as most of the other European political parties do, but give ideological priority to the ethnic or national factor. Does this imply a common and distinctive attitude to European integration ?The answer must be no; they disagree not only on sectoral policies, but their fundamental outlook is different.  FDF-RW and VU, on the one hand, though bitter opponents on the national level, both favour a federal Europe, in order to promote autonomy for their respective regions.Fianna Fait on the other hand, white recognizing the political and economic importance of Europe, is sceptical on the institutional level.  Fianna Faits approach is essentially pragmatic, being a government party identifying its interests with the national interest, whereas the Belgian federalists cannot identify themselves with the existing Belgian state.  Therefore it is unlikely at present that Fianna Fait wilt leave its European allies - the Gaullists - to join a hypothetic regionalist grouping in European Parliament.

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Rafałowski

In recent years, a significant amount of research has been devoted to theorising and explaining parties’ vote-seeking behaviours with regard to emphasising certain policy domains and ignoring others. These strategies are largely determined by the parties’ issue ownership and the context of the competition. In this article, I explore the interaction between these two groups of factors, that is, how a given party type and its role within the party system moderate the political actor’s responsiveness to various unfolding events. The study uses a collection of Facebook posts published by the official profiles of some of the Polish political parties. I demonstrate that the competitors develop distinct strategies of issue emphasis in accordance with the incentives coming from the events that occur on the one hand and their strengths and weaknesses related to certain issue domains on the other.


2016 ◽  
pp. 37-53
Author(s):  
Jerzy Łazor ◽  
Wojciech Morawski

The political discourse in Poland in the final years before the fall of communism in 1989, was based on a strong opposition between the authorities and the rest of society. Even then, however, support for the opposition was not unanimous, and it was even less so in previous years. Most Poles considered the communist system forced, exogenous, oppressive, unacceptable, and supported by the Soviet threat. Still, individual reactions were varied: there were different paths to be taken through communism. The authors of the paper discuss how these paths contributed to differing recollections of the period. They focus on the collective memory of political parties and politicians, particularly on the controversial question of collaborating with the communist regime and the rights to veteran status among the former opposition members. It is a story of two types of memory: the one stressing reconciliation and the other pushing the distinction between former regime representatives and democratic opposition members


Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Abstract Political parties share a very bad reputation in most European countries. This paper provides an interpretation of this sentiment, reconstructing the downfall of the esteem in which parties were held and their fall since the post-war years up to present. In particular, the paper focuses on the abandonment of the parties' founding ‘logic of appropriateness’ based, on the one hand, on the ethics for collective engagement in collective environments for collective aims and, on the other hand, on the full commitment of party officials. The abandonment of these two aspects has led to a crisis of legitimacy that mainstream parties have tried to counteract in ways that have proven ineffective, as membership still declines and confidence still languishes. Finally, the paper investigates whether the new challenger parties in France, Italy and Spain have introduced organizational and behavioural changes that could eventually reverse disaffection with the political party per se.


2011 ◽  
pp. 259-268
Author(s):  
Svetozar Ciplic

In this paper an attempt has been made to present one of the most prominent contradictions of the contemporary parliamentarianism in states which have a proportional voting system. This contradiction stems from the three-fold relationship between: a voter, a member of parliament (MP) and a political party from whose electoral list the MP is elected. On the one hand, a person does not have the possibility to be elected in the parliament if acting independently, outside the political party and its party mechanisms and logistical capacities. On the other hand, after being appointed the parliamentary term as a result of the party's will, the person attains the freedom, through their free term of office, to distance themselves from their political party, and even to leave it and join another political option. The paper also shows that this phenomenon significantly affects and deforms the principle of citizens' sovereignty, given that it is the political parties which have the major impact on the voters' sovereign will expressed at the elections. .


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 715-735
Author(s):  
Daniela Braun ◽  
Markus Tausendpfund

Despite a higher turnout, the ninth elections to the European Parliament can still be considered as second-order elections . In Germany, the governing parties - in particular the CDU and SPD - experienced a significant loss compared to the 2017 Bundestag elections and the 2014 European elections, whereas the Greens are the winners . The article provides information on the conditions framing the European Parliament elections and focuses on political parties and citizens . The empirical findings show, on the one hand, that the European integration issue is more salient in the manifestos than generally assumed and, on the other hand, that citizens’ knowledge of the European Union continues to be low . Against this background, turnout, electoral choices and reasons for these are discussed . Moreover, the composition of the newly elected European Parliament and possible implications are described . [ZParl, vol . 50 (2019), no . 4, pp . 715 - 735]


Politik ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Wolkenstein

Political theory has for a long time paid scant attention to the topic of political parties and partisanship. In recent times, however, there has emerged a body of theoretical research that seeks to draw attention to the place of parties and partisanship in a well-functioning polity. This article offers an overview of this research, discussing approaches that focus on partisanship as an associative practice, on the one hand, and approaches that focus on the party as an institution, on the other. The article argues that, while the two approaches no doubt usefully complement each other, concentrating on partisanship at the expense of party risks paying insufficient attention to the institutional structures that ultimately connect partisans to the state and allow them to exercise power. This is problematic insofar as it is especially the party as institution whose virtues are currently called into question. Given this, the article proposes to shift the emphasis in theoretical research from partisanship-centred theories to party-centred theories.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 733-754
Author(s):  
Maciej Hartliński

This article is part of the special cluster titled Political Parties and Direct Democracy in Eastern Europe, guest-edited by Sergiu Gherghina. The article is the first attempt to describe and compare five nationwide referendums in Poland after 1989 as tools of direct democracy exploited by political parties. The article makes two primary contributions to the literature. The explanation focuses on the circumstances as well as the two main motives of the referendum initiators, that is, to cause trouble for political opponents and strengthen one’s own position by legitimising one’s own proposals concerning the political system and foreign policy directions. Moreover, the article discusses six methods employed by political parties to use the institution of nationwide referendum for their own political purposes. Interestingly, the Polish example shows that nationwide referendums have twofold effects for their initiators. On the one hand, they allow political parties to effectively realise the aims behind the initiated referendum. On the other hand, both political parties (1996, 1997, 2003) and presidents (1996 and 2015) sustained defeats in the next parliamentary or presidential elections.


2004 ◽  
Vol 56 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 305-321
Author(s):  
Dragan Djukanovic

The revision of the Dayton agreement implies only the restructuring of the Annex 4 of the Constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina or actually the present constitutional construction and territorial composition of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The unfavourable economic and political situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina shows that the achievements resulting from the implementation of the Dayton agreement have been modest so far. The author substantiates this by presenting the data on a very small number of persons who managed to achieve their right to repatriation to their pre-war homes (in the 1995-2003 period). In addition, he notices that many changes of the Dayton agreement have already been made in the last seven years since it has been implemented, presenting the specific activities and decisions taken by the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the period after signing of the Dayton agreement there were several different ideas on the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina - to be established as a centralist state, as a decentralised country, as the one organised in cantons keeping up the two-entity structure at the same time. Therefore, the political parties in BH took different positions regarding the necessity to change some constitutional solutions. The Boshniak, Croatian and civil political parties are pleading for restructuring of the constitutional solutions in the form they are provided for by the Dayton agreement. On the other hand, the Serb political parties speak in favour of keeping up the existing constitutional construction. As the author assesses the new initiatives for constitutional reconstruction of Bosnia-Herzegovina are based on the proposals for decentralisation, regionalisation and (finishing of) cantonisation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as abrogation of entities. Analysing the positions of the leading factors of the international community the author points out that they have not reached consensus on the initiative for restructuring of the existing constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina. On the contrary, the leading factors of the international community mostly emphasise that citizens/peoples of BH should be the ones to decide on the constitutional construction of their country. The author concludes that it would be unrealistic to expect that the minimum of social and national consensus would be reached on the constitutional restructuring of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as on holding of the new international conference (Dayton II). As the author says it seems most realistic that the representatives of the international community will change some of its provisions in the field while implementing the Dayton agreement.


Author(s):  
Magdalena Danek

The restitution of self-government in Poland is considered to be one of the key foundations of the political transformation. In recent years, and in particular during the local election campaign in autumn 2018, we could observe the clash of various concepts related to the assessment of the current territorial self-government activity. Their authors were, on the one hand, the Law and Justice party ruling in Poland since 2015 (within the United Right), and on the other, opposition groups, in particular the Civic Platform, Modern Party and Polish People’s Party. Therefore, the given article compares the views presented by the above-mentioned political parties regarding the evaluation of the current activity of self-governments and the vision of their further role in the polish political system. For this purpose, a qualitative analysis of the content of their electoral programs prepared for the local elections in autumn 2018 was carried out.


Author(s):  
Anatolii Petrovich Mykolaiets

It is noted that from the standpoint of sociology, “management — a function of organized systems of various nature — (technical, biological, social), which ensures the preservation of their structure, maintaining a certain state or transfer to another state, in accordance with the objective laws of the existence of this system, which implemented by a program or deliberately set aside”. Management is carried out through the influence of one subsystem-controlling, on the other-controlled, on the processes taking place in it with the help of information signals or administrative actions. It is proved that self-government allows all members of society or a separate association to fully express their will and interests, overcome alienation, effectively combat bureaucracy, and promote public self-realization of the individual. At the same time, wide direct participation in the management of insufficiently competent participants who are not responsible for their decisions, contradicts the social division of labor, reduces the effectiveness of management, complicates the rationalization of production. This can lead to the dominance of short-term interests over promising interests. Therefore, it is always important for society to find the optimal measure of a combination of self-management and professional management. It is determined that social representation acts, on the one hand, as the most important intermediary between the state and the population, the protection of social interests in a politically heterogeneous environment. On the other hand, it ensures the operation of a mechanism for correcting the political system, which makes it possible to correct previously adopted decisions in a legitimate way, without resorting to violence. It is proved that the system of social representation influences the most important political relations, promotes social integration, that is, the inclusion of various social groups and public associations in the political system. It is proposed to use the term “self-government” in relation to several levels of people’s association: the whole community — public self-government or self-government of the people, to individual regions or communities — local, to production management — production self-government. Traditionally, self-government is seen as an alternative to public administration. Ideology and practice of selfgovernment originate from the primitive, communal-tribal democracy. It is established that, in practice, centralization has become a “natural form of government”. In its pure form, centralization does not recognize the autonomy of places and even local life. It is characteristic of authoritarian regimes, but it is also widely used by democratic regimes, where they believe that political freedoms should be fixed only at the national level. It is determined that since the state has achieved certain sizes, it is impossible to abandon the admission of the existence of local authorities. Thus, deconcentration appears as one of the forms of centralization and as a cure for the excesses of the latter. Deconcentration assumes the presence of local bodies, which depend on the government functionally and in the order of subordination of their officials. The dependency of officials means that the leadership of local authorities is appointed by the central government and may be displaced.


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