ZParl Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen

The 2015 election to the Danish Folketing saw yet another change of government . Despite gains for the liberal-conservative Venstre, the incumbent centre-right government led by Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (Venstre) lost its majority due to...

Despite a higher turnout, the ninth elections to the European Parliament can still be considered as second-order elections . In Germany, the governing parties - in particular the CDU and SPD - experienced a significant loss compared to the 2017...

On the 24th of June 2018, for the first time Turkish citizens voted in separate elections for both parliament and the head of government . The constitutional amendments passed a year earlier in a controversial referendum became effective at the same...

The Filibuster, more a historical coincidence than a deliberate innovation, is one of the most powerful tools of minorities in the U .S . Senate . Historically known for never-ending talking marathons, it transformed the contemporary Senate into a...

In order to obtain a stable size of the Bundestag and at the same time maintain the proportional distribution of seats among the parties the introduction of multi-member districts should be considered . In each district, the parties would present...

The 2018 Congressional elections ended with an ambivalent result for both the Democrats and Republicans . The turnout recorded the best result in almost a century . The Democrats were able to recapture a significant majority in the U .S . House of...

It is questionable if the concept of the European election as a second-order national election is still a useful explanatory model or if the European election has become a relevant “Europeanized” election . Therefore, six hypotheses about the...

Every ten years, the districts to the U .S . House of Representatives are redrawn, a task that in most states falls to state legislatures . Electoral success for Republican state parties has provided the party with the opportunity to draw district...

Foreign policy is traditionally considered as one of the essential responsibilities of the executive . Recent parliamentary foreign policy initiatives, however, have brought forward a foreign policy claim . This does not only reflect the...

For millennia, Europe was a battlefield whose history was marked by countless wars among European peoples, blood and tears . The two world wars that cost millions of lives were the culmination of this development and a lesson rarely learned from...

In Germany, the election to the 9th European Parliament (EP) was influenced by a modification of the electoral law, as it had already occurred in the preceding European election . The removal of the five-percent threshold once more gave seven small...