In my essay I have studied the reform Hungarian regulation special legal order. The National Assembly have changed considerably the conception of the regulation of the special legal order with the ninth amendment of The Fundamental Law of Hungary. In this context I have analysed the declaration conditions of new special legal order terms. These are the state of war, the state of emergency and the state of danger. In addition I have studied the amendment of powers which affects the National Assembly, the Government and the President of the Republic.
In my opinion the reform of Hungarian special legal order was needful. The points of amendment are the devolution of special legal order powers to the Government and the decrease of special legal order terms. Then again I have worded critical remarks too. For example it is incorrect to identify special legal order with special legal order terms. According to my standpoint we can talk about special legal order before declaration too. On the other hand, it is problematical to distinguish between special government decrees from normal government decrees.
Keywords: The Fundamental Law of Hungary, special legal order, special legal order term, amendment, power
Áron Ősze, PhD student , Postgraduate Doctoral School of Law and Political Sciences of Széchenyi István University, Department of Constitutional Law and Political, aronosze@gmail.com.
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The coronavirus pandemic has posed a serious challenge to all decision-makers in the world, among whom the Hungarian National Assembly and the Government. Some measures were (and are) self-evident, such as those prescribing the wearing of masks, putting restrictions on social contacts or isolating persons contaminated with the virus. But what is the matter with elections? Can a fundamental right fixed in the Fundamental Law be restricted and if so, on what basis? The present paper aims to find answers to these questions while reviewing other countries' strategies to cope with the virus. Indeed, those nations that had to organize general elections under these exceptional circumstances found themselves in a particularly difficult situation. As to Hungary, it must be pointed out that in the early phases of the pandemic the electoral laws had not changed, preparations for local government by-elections had been done and votings had been carried out in only two local government by-elections. But the rapid expansion of the disease brought a radical change and made it necessary to introduce a special legal order. In exercise of the authorisation as provided for by the common rules for the special legal order of the Fundamental Law, the National Assembly suspended - for the duration of the state of danger - the exercise of fundamental rights as regards elections and referendums, thereby clearly favouring and protecting fundamental rights relating to life and health.
Keywords: epidemic, special legal order, suffrage, elections, right to health
Attila Mihály Nagy, Research Assistant, Faculty of Law of the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, nagy.attila.mihaly@kre.hu.
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The study would highlight and explain the European Parliamentary election results of the so-called joke political parties (the German Die Partei [The Party], and the Hungarian Magyar Kétfarkú Kutya Párt [Hungarian Two-tailed Dog Party]) in 2019. Apart from the results we are going to analyze the campaign of the two parties and look at what issues they considered important in their campaign, further on how these parties tried to reach their voters with their messages. They can use nationwide media outlets as the traditional parties or they are only limited for social media? Moreover, the presentation would like raise the question, if we even can talk about one party family or not, through looking at the similarities and the differences of their. The presentation tries to answer questions like how strongly the anti-establishment and the protest catchwords are presented in the campaigns and what conclusions can we draw from the results of the election and the geographic location of the votes, which regions can be considered a stronger or a weaker location for these parties. Also, how do the results reflect the predictions of the surveys? Did the position of Die Partei improve or decline since the results achieved at the previous European Parliamentary elections? Furthermore, the research tries to insert the joke political parties into the party typology of political science. For this it is important to introduce the movement party theory of Kitschelt, which describes the political actors which use instruments of the social movements, but they compete on elections with parties. This complements with Gunther Diamond's party typology. They introduced two categories in movement parties: the left-libertarian and the post-industrial radical right. To understand how movement parties could gain an important role in western democracies, we should find out what happened with the traditional parties. That is the reason why the study would mention the cartel party theory in detail and the crisis of the representation. Thus, we must explain the three faces theory of Katz and Mair, which explains the changes in the leadership and membership of the party, which made the traditional parties face more and more constant challenges.
Keywords: joke political parties, European Parliamentary Election, Die Partei, MKKP, cartel parties
Péter Szegedi, PhD student, University of Pécs, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary Doctoral School, szegedi.peter@pte.hu
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In 2020 both local and parliamentary elections were due in Romania. However, a deep political crisis that was further aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic had quite serious consequences with regard to the elections: local elections had to be postponed, and the plans for early parliamentary elections had to be abandoned. After a few months of confusion concerning, the parliamentary elections could be organized on the originally planned date, and were won by the Social-Democratic Party. However, in the absence of coalition partners, this party was unable to form a government, providing an opportunity for the National Liberal Party to continue in power, with new coalition partners: the Save Romania Union and the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania. In this article I discuss the political context and the most important events leading to the parliament elections, paying special attention to the political crisis and the local elections. Then I present the electoral system and the regulations concerning the campaigns, before turning to the assessment of the election results and the presentation of the process of government formation. Finally, I single out some challenges that the new cabinet will have to face, and discuss the probable direction of the party system's development.
Keywords: Romania, elections, party system, electoral system, Covid-19 pandemic, Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR)
István Gergő Székely, Research fellow, PhD, Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities (Cluj, Romania), istvanszekely@yahoo.com.
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Bulgaria is one of the most unstable countries in European democracies in terms of government stability, as it is the country with the most early elections in Central and Eastern Europe. The legislature elected in 2017 has fulfilled its mandate, but the subsequent election has brought unprecedented instability to the political system of the Balkan country. This was the first time that a (political) government had not been formed after the election and that the competition had to be repeated. As the second election in July did not create a functioning government majority either, an third vote will be held at the end of the year in an unprecedented way. In the context of the two elections in 2021 so far, all the conceivable factors that tend to have an impact on government stability have this time specifically exacerbated the chaos. This case study approaches the issue from the perspective of government stability. After presenting the factors that usually affect stability, the baseline of the domestic political situation after the summer of 2020 will be described. After the presentation of the results of the two elections and their interpretation, the presentation of the domestic political consequences concludes this paper.
Keywords: Bulgaria, party system, government, instability, snap election
László Tóth, PhD candidate, ELTE Faculty of Law; Institute of Political Sciences, tothhlaszlo@gmail.com.
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In my study I describe the electronic, IT systems that help legislation, which are playing an increasingly important role nowadays.
E-legislation is intended to help the guarantees that appear on the procedural side of quality legislation, its purpose is to make them more effective. It intends to achieve this in part by publishing citizens' opinions, so that more practical decisions can be made that are closer to real life and, at the same time, better accepted by society.
In the first half of my study, I describe the path leading to the development of e-parliament, and then I examined the experience of using IT systems in practice. I conducted interviews to collect the experiences with the IT system. The subjects of the interviews were codifiers working in the central administration, who also worked with the previous system, but are already using the new programs in their daily work.
Based on the outcome of the interviews, I have summarized the advantages and disadvantages of e-legislative systems, and I will also present the directions of future developments.
Keywords: E-legislation, paperless parliament, ParLex, IJR, experiences
Edina Pálfi, doctoral student, Széchenyi István University Doctoral School of Law and Political Sciences, palfiedina87@gmail.com.
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Hungary's University of Public Service and Brill Publishers (Leiden, Holland) staged a joint online event on 3 May 2021 about the reactions of Parliaments as traditional institutions to the fast-changing political, social and economic environment of our age. The conference was occasioned by the launch of the International Journal of Parliamentary Studies. Timed to coincide with the Day of Parliament, the scientific event also commemorated the inaugural session of Hungary's first freely elected Parliament on 2 May 1990. The conference was moderated by Zsolt Szabó, the new journal's chief editor, as well as associate professor at the University of Public Service and the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church.
Keywords: parliamentarism, legislation, omnibus acts, parliamentary administration, pandemic.
Boglárka Borbély, doctoral student, Széchenyi István University Doctoral School of Law and Political Sciences, drborbelyboglarka@gmail.com.
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The Interparlamentary Union (‚the IPU') has recently published a summary of its research project comparing the administrative organisation of parliaments, which may be of interest to the wider professional public. As an organisation composed of almost all national parliaments around the world, the IPU helps parliaments not only to cooperate, but also to make them more democratic and efficient, and to the result of more and more published studies. This paper briefly reviews research that provides insight into parliamentary administration issues based on data collected over the past three years. The system of administrative structures, which is responsible for ensuring the organisational, daily, budgetary and technical functions of the legislature, plays a key role in the efficient functioning of parliaments by offering administrative expertise and institutional structure. The project provided a comprehensive, comparative overview of the PARLINE database, the survey indicators of 13 priority parliaments and their relevant internal rules of operation.
Keywords: E-legislation, paperless parliament, ParLex, IJR, experiences
Enikő Somogyi, PhD student, Doctoral School of Public Administration Sciences at the National Public Service University, somogyi.eniko@uni-nke.hu. ■
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