Sensitivity to Injustice of Politicians and Voters

This explorative study compares the sensitivity to injustice of 116 Members of the German National Parliament and 998 German citizens eligible to vote, from the perspective of a victim, an observer, a beneficiary, and a perpetrator. Politicians were found to have a significantly higher observer, beneficiary, and perpetrator sensitivity and a significantly lower victim sensitivity than voters. These results fit with the findings that observer and perpetrator sensitivity usually correlates positively with political engagement and beneficiary sensitivity, whereas victim sensitivity correlates negatively with political commitment.

The Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers (opla) in the Houses of the Oireachtas – History, Functions and Recent Key Parliamentary Legal Issues

The Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers (opla) is the in-house legal team in the Irish national parliament. It provides specialist, non-partisan legal advice to Parliament on a broad range of parliamentary, constitutional and corporate legal issues. In recent years, the opla has been assigned additional functions within the legislative process, now providing legal policy analysis and legislative drafting services to non-Government Members in respect of private legislative proposals and advising Members in respect of Government Bills. This article will provide a history of the opla, will outline some recent key parliamentary legal issues and will elaborate on the recent development of legislative drafting and advisory services within the Office.

Israel

This chapter investigates the factors affecting floor access in the Israeli national parliament—the Knesset. Although Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a proportional, closed-list electoral system, the Knesset’s rules of procedure give little control to parties over floor access. Analyzing over 46,000 speeches over three terms between 2009 and 2019, even in debates where party leadership does have control over who takes the floor, we find no strong evidence that such control is used to give more speech time to highly ranked representatives. This is at odds with predictions made by others in two ways: First, in that the parliamentary rules do not reflect the electoral incentives of party leadership; Second, in that parties do not appear to utilize whatever ability they possess to control their representatives’ speechmaking.

Accountability in EU Economic Governance: European Commissioners in Polish Parliament

This article analyses the interactions between the members of the Polish parliament with the European commissioners in the context of the European Semester, the annual cycle of economic coordination. The Commission drafts crucial documents in this process which assess the implementation of the Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs): the Annual (Sustainable) Growth Survey and the Country Reports. The goal of this article is to assess how the Commission is held to account by a national parliament and how this affects the level of implementation of CSRs. The findings suggest that the Commission is accountable to this national parliament, even if the form of accountability taken is rather innovative and its policy impact limited, at both the EU (the CSRs tend to be immune to Members of [national] Parliament’s contestation) and the national level, as the implementation of CSRs seems to be independent of the level of their scrutiny.

Formal genus of the value of justice in Indonesia

This research aimed to find the formal genus of the value of justice in Indonesia. As known, justice that holds the sense of plurality universally transcends the boundary of formality of narrative texts in a normative way. The plurality of the value of justice that is laden with universality transforms to the genus of the school of thoughts vis-à-vis justice throughout history. Reduced meaning of justice in the perspective and the process of legislation is not powerful enough to negate the genus of justice that inherently represents the fundamental characteristics of justice. The look of the legislative process attractively reflects the genus of hunger for power intended to justify ambitions among factions in the domain of democracy. The formality in the legislation no longer represents the principle of the definition of the legislation and it is getting further away from the reach of the definition of aspiration, let alone to become an inspiration of the objectives of the state as mandated in the constitution. Holistic approach used in this research to find out the formal genus of justice in Indonesia. This research found that religious matters in the legislation-related authorities have become an acceptable ornament among the piles of the works of morality. The integrity that has become the genus of justice morality has transformed into a collection of texts hanging all over the wall of the national parliament. Religions are used as tools of negotiation in the formulation and the making of narrative texts before they are further transformed into legislation. Religions and powers in legislation are competing to find their point of the genus of normativization as expected by each faction. Law came into existence earlier than expected, leaving behind its umbilical cord like a prematurely born soul, the cord through which the values of justice are transferred from its mother, and these values have the dimension of plurality. Law is born, but since it is separable from its genus, it does not carry much of the meaning of birth.

Post-feminist German heartland: On the women’s rights narrative of the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the Bundestag

This essay sketches out the post-feminist narrative employed by the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the German national parliament between October 2017 and July 2018. Striving to establish a hegemonic ontology, the Alternative für Deutschland conjures up a social imaginary of a German heartland, where equal rights between ‘naturally’ different women and men have long been achieved – a heartland that has to be protected from ‘Muslim culture’ as much as from the ‘leveling down’ imposed by a ‘radical feminist elite’. Between these frames, the Alternative für Deutschland presents itself as the only true champion of women and, while never asserting to be feminist, implicitly lays claim to a particular and exclusivist post-feminist position. I argue that the Alternative für Deutschland’s capabilities to promote this populist narrative have become further enhanced by its election to the national parliament, presenting a serious challenge and also a chance for German feminism to self-critically engage with issues of intersectionality and representation in public discourse.

Gender, Politics, Performance

The chapter introduces the reader to selected frames that are valuable in work on gender and political representation: embodiment, authenticity, and performative labor of (especially symbolic) representation. The chapter illustrates the dominant scripts of political representation and appeals to situated knowledge during claim-making in the Indian national parliament; the policing of gendered and religious behavioral scripts for authentic representation of minority women in Indian politics; salient intersections of caste, gender, and embodiment in the performance of symbolic representation in the election of India’s first female Speaker in Parliament; and more localized scripts of performing gender in party political spaces. It discusses the performances of women legislators in institutional and noninstitutional spaces with the aim of illustrating the intellectual and practical merits of applying a performance-based approach to analyzing gender and politics.

Disempowerment through the Backdoor: The Impact of Populist Parties on the National Parliament in Poland

Do populist governments disempower parliaments? If so, which strategies do they employ to do it? The empirical analysis here concerns two legislative periods in Poland: T1 2011–2015 (centre-right coalition, populist actors in the opposition) and T2 2015–2018 (populist government). The article traces changes in formal rules regulating scrutiny and law-making but also how these rules were interpreted and exercised. The article addresses the following explanatory factors: position in government, strength of parliamentary formal provisions and the readiness of political actors to revise institutional competences. The article shows that although changes to formal parliamentary powers were minor, disempowerment of the legislative was profound. The outcome has actually been achieved through radical changes in parliamentary practices regarding both law-making and scrutiny.