The paper depicts the theoretical basis of the principle of free mandate with special regard to Rousseau's people's sovereignty-theory and Sieyes' national sovereignty concept. The article overviews the appearance of the free mandate in European constitutions and it declares that the Hungarian Constitution formulates this principle irregularly because the reference to the public interest as the basis of the free mandate is unique. The history of the constitutional free mandate-clause and the practice of the Constitutional Court are also covered by the paper. The author deals with three important challenges of this principle: the faction discipline, the lobby and the parliamentary representation of nationalities (national minorities). The article analyses the faction or party discipline from the aspect of Weberian politics as vocation, and it delimits the institutions ensuring the independence of representatives and anti-corruption regulations. The paper highlights the ephemerous Hungarian lobby-regulation and the opportunities of avoidance of bills' social discussion. The author concludes that the current method of parliamentary representation of national minorities living in Hungary is incompatible with the principle of free mandate.
Keywords: free mandate, public interest, faction discipline, lobby, parliamentary representation of national minorities
Csaba Erdős PhD adjunct professor, Széchenyi István University, Deák Ferenc Faculty of Law and Political Sciences; Department of Constitutional Law and Political Sciences/National University for Public Service Faculty of Political Sciences and Public Administration, Institution of Constitutional Law, dr.erdos.csaba@gmail.com
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The study examines the amendment of Act proposals and their journey through the National Assembly with special regards to the amendment proposals submitted by MP's and deliberated in plenary and committee sessions. To achieve its goal the study analyses documents of the National Assembly submited between 2006 and 2016. The aim of the study is to assess the changes in the Act proposals in front of the National Assembly during this 10-year-period. Through this assessment we can also see the main tendencies of the legislation procedure in the work of the plenary and commitee sessions. The Act proposals are in a well prepared status, when they get in front of the Assembly, searching for approval, however the approval is preceded by political debates and amendments. The period between 2006 and 2010 was characterized by reforms followed by crisis. The actual reforms happened between 2010 and 2014, though the legislative overextensions could have been realized only at the expense of quality of the legislation. From 2014 consolidation has been started, and statistics seem to return to similar numbers as before 2010. In 2014 a new and more effective procedure was introduced by the Rules of the National Assembly. The whole procedure became more transparent however the connection between political debates and codification policy is still weak.
Keywords: legislative procedure, quantitative analysis, amendment proposal, parliamentary debate, Hungarian National Assembly
Zsolt Szabó adjunct professor/senior research fellow, Károli Gáspár Reformed Church University/National University for Public Service; szabo.zsolt@kre.hu
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The presidentialisation of the executive power in parliamentary democracies is a popular field of researches in the international political science. The purpose of this paper is to examine the presidentialisation of the executive power in Hungary since 2010. The theoretical and methodological framework of this analysis based on the important volume edited by Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb.
We try to apply this framework on new democracies. In the executive part we analyse the relationship between legislative and executive power, the position of the prime minister in the Cabinet, and the development of the institutions, which are in charge of the governmental coordination.
Analysing the party face of the presidentialisation the paper demonstrates the unquestionable role of party chairman Viktor Orbán. Three important processes influenced the party leadership of Viktor Orbán: The generational roots of the party in the early '90-s; the process of integration of dissent groups of former centre-right conservative parties; the organizational development of Fidesz party.
The main conclusion of this paper is that the unquestionable role and power of Viktor Orbán in the party was the requisite of the presidentialization process besides the traditions of the strong executive power in the Hungarian political system.
Keywords: presidentialization; executive power; party leadership; Orbán Cabinets; governance
László Tóth PhD student, ELTE Faculty of Law; Institute of Political Sciences, tothhlaszlo@gmail.com
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Free elections, based upon the principle of popular sovereignty, establish a democratic government sustained by the consent of the people. An election is a formal decision-making process, a tool for selecting representatives by the people. Modern representative democracy usually operates with free elections. Elections determine the winning party or parties by transforming votes to seats. In other words, an electoral system is a set of rules that determines the way elections are conducted and its results. The most popular electoral systems are the first-past-the-post system, the majority system and proportional representation. The Dutch electoral system uses a "pure" form of proportional representation, which results in the distribution of seats reflecting the political preferences of the voters.
The present paper first examines the Dutch party system, followed by the Dutch general elections held in 2017, emphasizing the highly proportional feature of the Dutch electoral system by using four indexes measuring the disproportionality of the system. Then, it tries to show that in The Netherlands as well as in Belgium, the highly proportional system does not favour multipartism as Duverger's second law holds, but it does not have significant effects on the party system (as Sartori holds), as far as the number of parties are concerned. It turns out, that some social and political events have much more effects on the number of parties than the electoral system does in both countries. The final conclusion of this paper is that there is a complex and strong interdependency between the electoral systems, the party systems and some of the social and political (including constitutional) changes in both countries.
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