scholarly journals Justice and equality for all? Proportional representation in Belgium and France (1883-1921)

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (86) ◽  
pp. 28-62
Author(s):  
Frederik Dhondt
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Political System ◽  
Proportional Representation ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
Moderate Position

Whereas 19th century Belgium is traditionally framed as heavily dependent on France, this image ought to be nuanced for its political system. During what Pierre Rosanvallon named the transnational ‘proportional moment’ (1899-1914), the introduction of Proportional Representation in parliamentary elections generated a French interest in Belgium as the ‘electoral laboratory of Europe’. Arguments raised in the French Chambre des Députés were similar to those used in Belgian Parliament. The present article addresses the structural differences between the electoral debate in both states. Whereas Belgian constitutional doctrine adapted smoothly to the introduction of proportionality (Oscar Orban/Paul Errera) and held a moderate position bordering on that of Hans Kelsen, French doctrine was divided between the Parisian Adhémar Esmein, who defended the majority system as the bedrock of republicanism, and provincial professors of constitutional law, who had corporatist ideas, or were in favour of judicial review (Joseph-Barthélémy, Léon Duguit). Raymond Carré de Malberg’s condemnation of proportional representation as impossible, or as the stepping-stone to direct democracy, ought to be situated within this context.

Constitutional Adjudication and Democracy

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dieter Grimm
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
World Wide ◽  
The United States ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Constitutional Adjudication

Constitutional adjudication is as old as democratic constitutionalism. But for a long period of time, the United States of America remained alone in subjecting democratic decision-making to judicial review. While constitutions had become widely accepted already in the 19th century, it took almost two hundred years until constitutional adjudication has gained world-wide recognition. In the 19th century, only Switzerland entrusted its Supreme Court with competencies in the field of constitutional law, yet, not including review of federal legislation. All other attempts to introduce constitutional adjudication failed. This is also true for Germany where the constitution of 1849 had provided for judicial review in an ample manner. But the constitution adopted by the revolutionary Paulskirchen Assembly did not enter into force because the monarchs refused their consent after the revolution had been put down.

Constitutional Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Tschentscher
Keyword(s):  
Judicial Review ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Genetic Diagnosis ◽  
Embryonic Stem ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Surrogate Motherhood ◽  
Constitutional Courts ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The 1960S

Research on constitutional law has come in different waves mirroring the development of states in recent decades. While the decolonization period of the 1960s still kept the old ties of constitutional “families,” comparison based on such ties has become ever less persuasive since the 1980s wave of constitution making following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Research about de facto and de jure constitutional law now tends to embrace institutional details like judicial review powers and procedures of direct democracy. The field of comparative constitutional law is controversial both in methods and substance. It still lacks a consistent framework of comparative tools and is criticized as illegitimate by scholars who insist on the interpretive autonomy within each constitutional system. Research in the area of fundamental rights has to deal with long-lasting controversies like the constitutionality of the death penalty. Bioethical regulation is another new field where constitutional positions tend to diverge rather than converge. Embryonic stem cell research, therapeutic cloning, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and surrogate motherhood are examples from biotechnology and reproductive medicine where constitutional scholars disagree about what, if anything, constitutional law can contribute to provide a basis or limit for regulation. With the worldwide rise of constitutional courts and judicial review, the standards for the interpretation of fundamental rights become more important. Legal scholarship has worked out the differences between the rule-oriented approach associated with Anglo-American legal systems versus the principle-based approach common to continental Europe.

Ein Ende mit Schrecken – Frankreich nach den Wahlen

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (188) ◽  
pp. 495-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Syrovatka
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Political Support ◽  
The Political ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Deep Crisis

The presidential and parliamentary elections were a political earthquake for the French political system. While the two big parties experienced massive losses of political support, the rise of new political formations took place. Emmanuel Macron is not only the youngest president of the V. Republic so far, he is also the first president not to be supported by either one of the two biggest parties. This article argues that the election results are an expression of a deep crisis of representation in France that is rooted in the economic transformations of the 1970s. The article analyses the political situation after the elections and tries to give an outlook on further political developments in France.

James Bryce and the Australian Constitution

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-200
Author(s):  
Stephen Gageler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Constitutional Development ◽  
Practical Operation ◽  
Responsible Government ◽  
Shed Light

James Bryce was a contemporary of Albert Venn Dicey. Bryce published in 1888 The American Commonwealth. Its detailed description of the practical operation of the United States Constitution was influential in the framing of the Australian Constitution in the 1890s. The project of this article is to shed light on that influence. The article compares and contrasts the views of Bryce and of Dicey; Bryce's views, unlike those of Dicey, having been largely unexplored in contemporary analyses of our constitutional development. It examines the importance of Bryce's views on two particular constitutional mechanisms – responsible government and judicial review – to the development of our constitutional structure. The ongoing theoretical implications of The American Commonwealth for Australian constitutional law remain to be pondered.

WHAT ARE CONSTITUTIONS, AND WHAT SHOULD (AND CAN) THEY DO?

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Alexander
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Principal Function ◽  
Fundamental Law

AbstractA constitution is, as Article VI of the United States Constitution declares, the fundamental law of the land, supreme as a legal matter over any other nonconstitutional law. But that almost banal statement raises a number of theoretically vexed issues. What is law? How is constitutional law to be distinguished from nonconstitutional law? How do morality and moral rights fit into the picture? And what are the implications of the answers to these questions for such questions as how and by whom should constitutions be interpreted? These are the issues that I shall address.Alexander proceeds as follows: In section I he takes up law's principal function of settling controversies over what we are morally obligated to do. In section II he then relate law's settlement function to the role of constitutional law. In particular, he discusses how constitutional law is distinguished from ordinary law, and he also discusses the role of constitutions in establishing basic governmental structures and enforcing certain moral rights. In section III he addresses the topic of constitutional interpretation, and in section IV the topic of judicial review. Finally, in section V, he discusses constitutional change, both change that occurs through a constitution's own rules for amendments and change that is the product of constitutional misinterpretations and revolutions.

The judicial review of legality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie R. Davidson ◽  
Leora Bilsky
Keyword(s):  
Judicial Review ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
New Model ◽  
Substantive Content ◽  
Comparative Constitutional Law ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Relationship Of

In comparative constitutional law, the various models of judicial review require courts to examine either the substantive content of legislation or the procedure through which legislation was passed. This article offers a new model of judicial review – ‘the judicial review of legality’ – in which courts review instead the forms of law. The forms of law are the ways in which law communicates its norms to the persons who are meant to comply with them, and they include generality, clarity, avoidance of contradiction, and non-retroactivity. Drawing on recent writing on the jurisprudence of Lon Fuller, this article argues that Fuller’s linking of the forms of law to a relationship of reciprocity between government and governed can ground judicial review and that such review provides a missing language to address important legislative pathologies. Moreover, through an analysis of recent developments in Israel, the article demonstrates that the judicial review of legality targets some of the key legal techniques of contemporary processes of democratic erosion which other models of judicial review struggle to address, all the while re-centring judicial review on the lawyer’s craftsmanship and thus reducing problems of court legitimacy. This article therefore offers a distinctive and normatively appealing way for courts to act in troubling times.

Demokracja nieprzedstawicielska – egalitarne „wyjście awaryjne”czy narzędzie autorytarnych populistów?

1970 ◽  
Vol 23 (301) ◽  
pp. 93-102
Author(s):  
Bartosz Rydliński
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Political System ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Democratic Political System

The article presents the main ideological and theoretic assumptions of non-representative democracy, having historically strongly left-wing character, not an easy practice of applying this form of democracy in Polish and European conditions. The author tries to indicate a certain dialectic dualism of direct democracy, which more and more often constitutes contemporary crisis of liberal democracy in the contemporary debate on the negative impact of neoliberal globalization on democratic political system.

scholarly journals JOAQUÍN COSTA I REGENERACJA HISZPANII

2018 ◽  
pp. 359-373
Author(s):  
Dominika Gołaszewska-Rusinowska
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Late 19Th Century

This case study focuses on the life and work of Joaquín Costa. He was a Spanish intellectual who in late 19th century and early 20th century started the intellectual and political movement called Regenerationism. This movement emerged in response against the political system of Spanish Restoration.  

scholarly journals The impact of using proportional representation system on the fragmentation of the party system in Algeria. Applied to the elections of the National People’s Assembly (1997–2017)

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Mahmoud Mahgoub
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Party System ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Proportional Representation ◽  
Effective Number ◽  
Legislative Elections ◽  
Representation System ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Number Of Parties ◽  
The Impact

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of using proportional representation system on the fragmentation of the party system in the Algerian political system within the period from 1997 to 2017, in which Algeria has experienced five legislative elections regularly every five years by testing a hypothesis about adopting the proportional representation system on the basis of the closed list during the foregoing legislative elections has obviously influenced the exacerbation of the Algerian party system’s fragmentation, compared to other factors. Design/methodology/approach The essence of the theoretical framework of this study is to address the effect of the electoral system as an independent variable on the party system as a dependent variable. The starting point for that framework is to reassess the “Duverger’s law,” which appeared since the early 1950s and has influenced the foregoing relationship, and then to review the literature on a new phase that tried to provide a more accurate mechanism for determining the number of parties and their relative weight, whether in terms of electoral votes or parliamentary seats. This means that researchers began to use a measure called the effective number of parties (ENP) for Laakso and Taagepera since 1979. The study elaborates the general concepts of the electoral system and the party system. It used Laakso, Taagepera index of the “ENP” to measure the phenomenon of fragmentation party during the five legislative elections from 1997 to 2017 in Algeria. Findings The results of the study reveal that the proportional representation electoral system – beside other factors – had clear impacts on the fragmentation of the Algerian party system by all standards, whether on the level of the apparent rise in the number of the parties represented in the Algerian parliament from 10 parties in 1997 election to 36 parties in 2017 election or according to the index of Laakso and Taagepera (ENP). The average number of effective number of electoral parties in the five elections was around 7.66, and the average number of effective number of parliamentary parties in the five elections was around 4.39, which puts Algeria in an advanced degree of the fragmentation of the party system. Originality/value This study about the phenomenon of the fragmentation of the party system, which is one of the new subjects in the field of comparative politics – globally and in the Arab world. Hence, the value of this study aims to shed light on this mysterious area of science, the fragmentation of the party system in the Algerian political system during the period from 1997 to 2017.

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