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The Party System of the European Parliament between 2004–2019
112-130Views:138The paper examines the party system of the European Parliament (EP) between 2004–2019
through European Parliamentary Groups. It applies party system typologies in an international
case. The examined period starts from 2004, which marks the largest enlargement of the
dominating the decision-making In addition to the widely used typologies developed by Blondel
and Sartori, the present paper focuses on the relationship between the political groups in the
EP and their role in decision-making. It draws conclusions about the nature of the party system
and its changes over three cycles from the internal cohesion indices and coalition statistics of
the political groups. The party system of the EP is a polarised pluralist system dominated by
two political groups (bidominant). In the period under review, the party system of the EP can be
characterized as balanced, showing only small changes. -
The Gypsy card: Manifestations of the Anti-Gypsism in the Parliamentary speeches
131-155.Views:183The present paper aims to investigate the rhetoric of the Hungarian far right about Roma by the Parliamentary speeches of far right politicians. It unfolds the topics, discourses how the MPs of MIÉP and Jobbik talked about Roma. Within these topics it examines the different represen-tations, images of Roma used by far right politicians during those Parliamentary terms during which they entered the Parliament. The paper identifies when and how the far right has talked about Roma and unfolds how the far right rhetoric has contributed to maintaining, reproducing or even strengthening the anti-Roma attitudes in the Hungarian society.
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The 2024 European Parliamentary Elections
52-76Views:172One of the most important event of the 2024 super election year was the elections of the European Parliament – which took place from June 6 to 9 – because the European Union has reached a turning point. Classified as a second order election, it has taken on a new significance in the light of the current global political events, of the geopolitical, social, and political situation, as well as of the crisis resulting from the pandemic, wars, and migration towards Europe. All of this raises several questions: What characteristics possess the tenth EP election under these new circumstances? In case the EP election starts showing new features, one may ask whether it can be described in terms of the second order characteristics. Further: how have the changes under these circumstances affected the nature of the election, the participation, the electoral results, and the performance of major and minor parties, as well as the ruling parties? To what extent can secondariness of the EP elections still be considered evident?
The situation is further complicated by the fact that this was the first election held after Brexit, which not only influenced the number of seats in the European Parliament and their distribution among countries, but also affected the electoral process as well as the composition of the parliamentary seating arrangements. -
The European Parliamentary Election as Second-Order Election
29-51Views:190Elections are in fact specific mechanisms for aggregating political preferences of the majority of voters into one will, transforming votes into seats. This is the major role of any election, whether at local, parliamentary, or EU level. The elections of the members of the European Parliament by direct and universal suffrage started in 1979, with the proposal that the members of the EP to be elected in accordance with a uniform procedure in all EU countries. In pursuit of a uniform electoral procedure for all the member-countries meant that European elections must be based on the principle of proportional representation using either the list system or the STV system. However, it turned out, that some challenges and difficulties arose reaching agreement on common principles of all countries and on the harmonisation of national traditions. One of the consequences of the complex relationship between the national parliamentary and the EP elections is that the composition of the EP does not precisely reflect the actual balance of political forces in the European Community, because the national political systems actually decide most of what there is to be decided politically. The European elections turned out to be second-order elections as additional political events to national elections. The most important political issues thus are determined more by the domestic political cleavages, than by decisions originating in the European Community. The present paper analyses the interrelationship between the first-order national elections and the second-order European elections based more or less on the works of Reif–Schmitt (1980), Marsch (1998), Covař (2016) and others.
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The 2022 Italian election under the microscope
53-72Views:330The 2022 parliamentary elections marked a turning point for the Italian political system in many ways. As a result of the measures approved and introduced over the past almost ten years to change the electoral system (electoral reforms, decisions of the Constitutional Court, constitutional amendments, parliamentary reforms, etc.), Italian voters had the opportunity to elect the new members of both chambers of the parliament under the same electoral system, for the first time in the Republican era. The purpose of the article is to present the steps leading to this historic moment by analysing in detail the different measures affecting the electoral system and their impact. The paper then describes the electoral results and explains the processes leading to the vast victory of Italy’s first female Prime Minister, with a particular focus on the return to the bipolar logic favoured by the electoral system following the release of the three-pole system in 2013.
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2019 Nyíregyháza City Council election: The Rawlsian interpretation of the local electoral reform
67-92Views:193One of the main perspectives and urgent tasks of the newly formed government following the general elections of 2010 was to reform the local eletoral system. It is true, that the number of seats of the local representative bodies were significantly decreased, but it begs the question whether this change can reasonably explain the fact that the government considered this step as one of the first and most significant measures of its governance. To raise this question is justified by the fact that the reform (Act No. L of 2010 on the election of local government representatives and mayors) was introduced on June 14, 2010, with only sixteen days after the new Parliament approved and voted for the government’s program, and elected Viktor Orbán as prime minister of Hungary. After a brief presentation of the institutional framewortk of the local electoral system, the aim of this paper is twofold: first, I would examine whether the local electoral reform of 2010 could be considered as a „fair” step, based on John Ralws’ conception of „justice as fairness”, second, I would like to explain the actual process of transforming votes into local legislative seats in the case of the city of Nyíregyháza, in 2019.
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The political representation of Hungary’s ethnic minorities in the context of voter turnouts in the local self-governmental elections and in the parliamentary elections
25-39Views:177The political representation of minorities within a nation-state is a task that has always posed a great challenge to countries with substantial ethnic minorities, since both the hardships of establishing an adequate legislative environment, both the sensitivity of the subject make it exceedingly difficult for the legislator to develop a sufficient system. The issue of the proper representation of those 13 recognised minorities that are considered constituent components ofthe state were part of Hungary’s political history since the regime change, and for a rather long period of time it seemed that the adequate solution for their political representation was the local governmental system of ethnic minorities. Since 2011 however, the electoral system makes it possible for ethnic minorities to be represented within the Hungarian Parliament as well, which raises the question of whether this will shift the attention of the affected minority groups from the local self-governments towards the parliamentary representation. In this paper, after reviewing the changes within the legislative environment and – in close connection with that – the problems surrounding the issue of political representation of ethnic minorities, I will attempt to answer this emerging question through a brief analyses based on the turnout-data regarding the 2014 and the 2019 elections local governmental elections.
