ZParl Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen

Institutional factors have considerable impact on the success of regional minority parties . This can be seen clearly in the cases of Catalonia, Quebec, and Scotland and their minority parties; the PQ, the CiU and the SNP . The combination of party...

The search for effective and legitimate will-formation and decision-making is one of the main topics of political science . Currently dialogue-oriented procedures of citizen-involve- ment are often regarded as hope for the future - or as useless...

Although it has apparently not led to any problems in North Rhine-Westphalia that prime ministerial candidates must be elected members of parliament its state parliament has been discussing the possibility of deleting that constitutional provision ....

The election campaign became ‘cuddly’ since neither the Left Party nor the CDU con- fronted the SPD, a desired coalition partner for both parties, head-on . Furthermore the government had settled potentially controversial topics before the...

The outcome of the sixth election to the Saxonian Landtag led, like in 2004, to a coalition of strong Christian Democrats with weak Social Democrats and with Stanislaw Tillich as Prime Minister of Saxony, making him the longest-serving Premier of a...

After 24 years in power, the CDU was replaced by a new coalition composed of The Left, the SPD and the Greens and led by Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow, a member of The Left party . This constellation is entirely new in Germany . Although the CDU...

Since 2014, the Prime Minister of Thuringia is a member of The Left, a socialist party with roots in the former GDR . However, in the Western part of Germany The Left is hardly present in regional parliaments; a phenomenon that suggests important...

The Lisbon Treaty established the Early-warning-system (EWS) for the scrutiny of subsidi- arity which provides parliaments of the member states with the opportunity to influence law-making at the European level . In the case of Germany, this...

Due to the pluralization of the party system, government formation in Germany is moving away from coalitions within the established political camps and towards grand coalitions or other, sometimes complex coalitions between parties from different...

The fifth democratic election in South Africa was clearly won by the African National Con- gress . It received 62 .15 per cent of the votes and thus won a comfortable majority in the National Assembly . The liberal and pro-business Democratic...

Decision-making in matters of constitutional change seems hardly to comply with the rules associated with a parliamentary form of government . Constitutional changes require - at least - a two third majority in parliament . Thus, normally at least...

In order to investigate the thesis of a homogenization in the German party system in view of the 2013 Bundestag elections as compared to the two preceding elections (2005 and 2009), data contained in the Wahl-O-Mat is used as a new possible source...

To enable parliamentary control over both the government and the administration, the Constitutions in Germany assign information rights to parliament and to the opposition in parliament. Thus, parliament gains access to the government´s area....

Against the background of declining voter turnout in Germany, the introduction of a legal duty to vote has been proposed. Those who advocate the introduction of compulsory voting expect a significant increase of voter turnout. It can be argued,...

In the German mixed electoral system, district candidates are of two-fold importance. In those cases in which the electorate evaluate them in a positive manner, they help a party to win the district mandate and they may increase the party’s...