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• Majority Decision Making

  81-100

  Levente Nagy

  Views:

  207

  Modern democracies, based on pluralism, recognize and affirm diversity, permit peaceful
  coexistence of different interests, values and convictions, and advocate a form of political
  moderation. For democracy to function and to be successful two of the most challenging
  questions must be raised and answered: Who have the right for collective decision-making?
  What principle should be used for these people to be elected? With the development of modern
  democracies it has become more and more accepted the idea that democracy should rest upon
  the principle of majority rule, coupled with individual and minority rights. Majority rule thus
  refers to the quantitative aspect of democracy, while individual and minority rights express
  the qualitative or constitutional aspect of it. A detailed analysis of democratic decision-making
  processes shows that not all decisions made by legislature – whose members are elected by the
  majority of the people – are effective and good decisions, and points at the fact that most of the
  democratic decisions are not made by the majority but by minority groups, who quite often take
  the initiative and can seriously influence the majority. This paper focuses on these issues.

• The European Parliamentary Election as Second-Order Election

  29-51

  Levente Nagy

  Views:

  190

  Elections 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.