ZParl Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen

The article outlines the recent development of the petitioning system in Germany and discusses the most important private and state platforms for public, digitally signable petitions . Connecting private platforms with the parliamentary petitioning...

The term multi-level parliamentarism has been used to mark the position of German Land parliaments . To check the validity of this term, the relations between parliaments in regard to their parliamentary structure components, namely leadership,...

False diagnostics are dangerous if they lead to false therapies . This is also true for election analyses . Diagnostic trends such as “Polarization” and “a new Cleavage” currently dominate the field . Despite being supposed to provide...

In order to analyze whether the entry of the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) into parliaments has changed parliamentary debate culture a content analysis of budget debates for the period 2012-2017 is conducted, where the...

The elections in three East German Länder in 2019 did not only result in significant changes in the proportional vote share but also in severe shifts in constituency results between directly elected deputies . Against this backdrop this article...

The state election in Bremen in 2019 was marked by a head-to-head race between SPD and CDU and ended up with a considerably increased turnout and a historical result . The Christian Democrats managed to beat the Social Democrats for the first time...

Although the right to form and exercise parliamentary opposition has always been recognized as an essential part of the free democratic basic order, there is widespread disagreement within jurisprudence about the specific status of oppositional...

The article provides detailed insights into the pre-parliamentary stage of the legislative process for the county-level territorial restructuring in Brandenburg . In the further development of specific aspects of the draft bill, the state government...

After a slow beginning, Brandenburg’s election campaign became dominated by the SPD’s and AfD’s struggle to come in first . This contributed considerably to an increase in turnout to 61 .3 percent . Although the SPD won the election with 26 .2...

The peaceful revolution of 1989 began in Saxony . 30 years later, the public eagerly awaited the results of Saxony’s seventh state elections . The AfD was expected to gain a high share of votes after the party there had already been the strongest...

After a campaign, which was both polarized and poor in content, the state election failed to produce a clear majority in the Landtag . The winners of the election were The Left and the AfD, while the parties of the right and left center suffered...

The article briefly presents the history of the municipal assemblies in Germany and, among other things, deals with the change in the Lower Saxony municipal code 1962/63 . At present, there are still municipal assemblies in Schleswig-Holstein . To...

Several German “Länder” are currently testing participatory methods to obtain opinions and ideas of citizens on legal proposals . They aim at achieving outputs that are widely accepted by the public, and thus considered to be better . These...

This article investigates if a party system change has taken place in Spain from June 1977 to January 2019 . The operationalization of Smith’s (1989) definition of party system change requires the distinction between “normal” and “unusual”...

The Ochsentour describes the slow, hard road to the top of political positions and is colloquially negatively associated . But despite this negative image, it remains unclear what actually constitutes this process of intra-party proving and how to...

Party statutes stipulate their internal rules . Among other things they address how candidates are selected, who is allowed to nominate candidates, who is eligible to stand as a candidate and which voting procedures apply . For the 2017 Bundestag...

After Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his party PSOE were unable to pass the state budget for 2019 due to a continuing blockade in parliament, Sánchez called new elections for the end of April 2019 . This was just another chapter in a...