Nepal government is secure for now

Significance Assembly members are elected indirectly. Last July, Sher Bahadur Deuba was appointed prime minister in line with a Supreme Court order. Deuba’s multi-party coalition has a sizeable majority in the House of Representatives, parliament’s lower house, and a comfortable one in the National Assembly. Impacts If local elections take place in May as currently planned, they will serve as a barometer of public sentiment towards the leading parties. KP Sharma Oli, whom Deuba replaced as premier, will be eyeing a return to power. Politicking risks distracting the government from pursuing important policy goals.

Increasing the Popularity of Antisystem (Non-Traditional) Parties in the Czech Republic

The article examines the course of the elections to the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, their role and place in the political process of the country. The author argues that pluralism of opinion and multiparty system in the Czech Republic practically confirm their real strength, as evidenced by the participation of many parties in parliamentary elections and the fact, that that nine of them managed to overcome the 5% barrier and to obtain a certain number of deputy mandates. The programs of parliamentary parties are analyzed, their main election slogans and the results they achieved in the elections. Much attention in the article is paid to the winner of this election – the centrist political force – movement "Action of dissatisfied citizens", whose leader was appointed Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. Emphasis is placed on new trends in the political process, which were confirmed during the will of the people. Among them, the author highlights the growing popularity of anti-system (non-traditional) parties. In their election statements, these parties set out to protest the change in the political system of society. Along with this process, the crisis of traditional parties deepened, who were previously members of the governing bodies of the state, but they failed to demonstrate their compliance with voter inquiries, who sought solutions to pressing issues. This is confirmed by the results of traditional Czech parties – Communist Party of the Czech Republic and Moravia, which managed to get only 7.76% of the vote of the voters and the leader of the previous elections – the Czech Social Democratic Party, which won the support of only 7.27% of voters, having lost almost 13% of the vote in four years.

WOMEN IN THE IRISH PARLIAMENT: HISTORY AND MODERN STATE OF POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

The article attempts to trace the history of women's political representation in the Irish parliament - from the struggle for the right to vote and to be elected to parliament to the current level of women's representation in the Oireachtas and related discussions in the political elite and Irish society. The author draws attention to the specifics of the policy of various Irish parties in relation to the problem of representation of women in parliament and demonstrates the importance of political and national culture for such a phenomenon as the participation of women in politics. Analyzing the change in the proportion of women in the lower house of the Oireachtas, the author demonstrates the influence of the Irish women's movement on the dynamics of the number of female TDs. The author concludes that the policy of affirmative action played a significant, but insufficient role in the country, which for a long time remained under the influence of the Catholic Church and its patriarchal view of the role of women in society.

An Empirical Study on Women Representation in Parliament of South Asian Nations

Women have been discriminated in every sphere of life. In South Asia, women constitute roughly half of the population, yet they are rarely seen in parliament or as ministers. It is true that in all sphere of political leadership women are severely underrepresented or in other words, men greatly outnumber women in every sphere of decision making even in parliament also. Women need the power to break up the trap of confinement that engage them busy in domestic work and put many restrictions on them in this patriarchal society. Lack of opportunity and low representation in the political sphere deprives women of being politically empowered. This paper is an attempt to examine the study the women representation in the lower house of parliament and as well as to compare this with the average data of women members in the lower house of Asia and World.

Canada

Canada is a federal parliamentary democracy with a bicameral legislature at the national level. Members of the upper House, styled the Senate, are appointed by the prime minister, and members of the lower House, the House of Commons, are elected in single-member plurality electoral districts. In practice, the House of Commons is by far the more important of the two chambers. This chapter, therefore, investigates access to the floor in the Canadian House of Commons. We find that the age, gender, and experience of MPs have little independent effect on access to the floor. Consistent with the dominant role of parties in Canadian political life, we find that an MP’s role within a party has by far the most significant impact on their access to the floor. Intriguingly, backbenchers in the government party have the least access of all.

Switzerland

What determines the speechmaking behavior of legislators in the lower house (Nationalrat) and the upper house (Ständerat) of the Swiss federal parliament? In this chapter, we employ newly collected data on debates, covering the 46th–50th legislative periods (1999–2019), to investigate the determinants of participation in debates, and the verbosity of members’ speeches. The Swiss electoral system creates incentives for personal vote seeking in both chambers, but the institutional settings are markedly different in the lower and upper house. The smaller upper house has relatively free debates, while debates in the Nationalrat are tightly regulated. We find that faction leaders are more likely to participate in the lower house. At the same time, committee chairpersonship and seniority are the most important predictors of speechmaking behavior, increasing both the participation and verbosity of speeches. Gender, in turn, fails to play a role in speeches once we consider the effect of other covariates.

Poland

This chapter provides an overview of parliamentary speechmaking in the lower house of the Polish parliament, the Sejm, between 1991 and 2015. Members of the Sejm are elected under an open-list PR system, which creates incentives for legislators to use parliamentary speeches to cultivate personal vote. By analyzing all speeches held in seven terms, we find some evidence that electoral incentives impact parliamentary speechmaking. However, we observe no differences between female and male legislators. Furthermore, we conduct an analysis of speechmaking in two specific types of debates. We explain what groups of legislators participate in them and offer an interpretation of the observed effects.

Legislating Right, Contemplating Duty: Parliamentary Debate on RTE Second Amendment Bill

The study is an attempt to understand the prevailing discourse in India on education as a right by closely reading the parliamentary debates on The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (Second Amendment) Bill, 2017. Prior to the passing of the above-mentioned amendment bill The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 had debarred schools from detaining or expelling a child till the completion of her elementary education. This provision was amended by the Indian Parliament by passing the bill. When the bill was moved in the Indian parliament it generated debate on the various aspects of education and schooling. The study critically analyses the texts of two proceedings of the parliamentary debate: one from the lower house (Lok Sabha) and the other from the upper house (Rajya Sabha). The study concludes that the deliberation on the bill turned the right-based approach on elementary education almost upside down. The 86th amendment in the Indian constitution and subsequent enactment of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 had recognized children in the age group of 6–14 years as ‘right holders’ while the Indian state had been identified as the ‘duty bearer’. The discourse emerged in the Indian Parliament during the debate on the Amendment Bill, 2017 constituted Indian children of school-going age, their parents and teachers as groups accountable to the state for achieving the goals for universal elementary education, while the Indian state was constituted as an entity with the right to demand compliances from children, parents and teachers.

The Impact of Migration Processes on the Organization and Conduct of Elections to the state Duma of the Russian Federation of the VIII Convocation

In this article, the author considers the influence of migration processes on the organisation and conduct of elections to the State Duma of the Russian Federation of the VIII convocation The migration agenda can influence the electoral campaign in the context of two main vectors — the direct influence of migrants on voting and the factor of the impact of migration processes on the public opinion of voters from among the representatives of the old-time population In addition, the study examines the positions of political parties and actors regarding migration processes in the context of the formation of a general discourse of their election programs — both parliamentary and non-parliamentary Particular attention of the work is focused on the situation in the unrecognised republics of the South-East of Ukraine, the population of which is actively acquiring the citizenship of the Russian Federation and, accordingly, will be able to directly participate in the elections of the deputies of the lower house of the Russian parliament.

Parliamentary Scrutiny of the European Semester: The Case of Poland

The European Semester became an essential part of the revised governance architecture of the Europe 2020 reform strategy for the Single European Market under the conditions of the global financial crisis and the emerging eurozone crisis a decade ago. The article examines to what extent the European Semester offers channels to establish <em>throughput legitimacy </em>by granting national parliaments the ability to effectively scrutinise executive decision-making in the annual policy cycle. Poland is chosen as the case study for parliamentary scrutiny of the EU’s system of multi-level governance in the East-Central European region. The analysis adopts a liberal intergovernmentalist two-level approach. On the domestic level it concentrates on the involvement of the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, on the drafting of the Polish National Reform Plans for the annual Semester policy cycle between 2015 and 2020. The basis for the analysis are official transcripts from the plenary debates in the relevant committees, the European Affairs Committee and the Public Finance and the Economic Committee. The Polish case study illustrates that the European Semester represents a predominantly elite-driven process of policy coordination, which is strongly geared towards EU-level executive bargaining processes between national governments and the European Commission at the expense of domestic parliamentary scrutiny.