The article evaluates the more and more frequently articulated postulates for changing the electoral system in Poland. In most cases, supporters of replacing the proportional representative system with the majority system claim that changing the mechanism of seat allocation will improve the state of Poland's modern democracy. A recent diagnosis points to a number of shortcomings of the Polish political system in several dimensions, including the bad quality of political class and political parties which might be remedied by a change to the system of redistribution of parliamentary seats. According to supporters of such an option, it will reduce the number of political parties in the Parliament thus contributing to stabilisation of the political system. This conviction is evidently influenced by the so-called Duverger's law, concerning the relation between the electoral system, the party system and the wider political system. The authors of the proposed changes tend to forget, however, that the Duverger's law is nowadays rejected, even by its originator. The same concerns other presumed arguments supporting majority systems, including the responsibility of authorities, more efficient organisation of the political scene, more genuine representation of the voters or restoring to the voting act its original electoral function, etc. In fact, the effectiveness of an electoral system is influenced by a number of factors of which the 'pure' election model is not a decisive one. When selecting a model of electoral law the electoral system should be examined as a whole rather than from the point of an electoral model. For example, the size of constituencies or regulations eliminating extreme parties should be taken into consideration. Eventually, the outcome of the election is affected by non-institutional factors, such as political culture, social and political divide, the degree of political awareness, the economic and cultural background, etc. Eventually, it should be realised that no electoral law is able to arrange the political scene. The problems of 'Polish democracy', which is still an emerging one, do not result from electoral law, but from the general, much deeper crisis of the political parties, while it is the parties which are the most significant element of contemporary democracies, critical to the effectiveness and functionality of any political system.
This article presents not only an empirical analysis of the voting records of the Council of the European Union, but also an analysis of the acts that have not been passed and therefore represents an innovative approach to research on the voting practice in the Council of the European Union. The aim of this paper is to further our empirical knowledge of the Council decision-making process by examining a data set consisting of all acts proceeded in the Council from 2005 to 2006. The data confirm that generally the Member States made collective decisions by consensual negotiations, even in the 80 per cent cases where they could activate voting, and that the new Member States contested votes less often than the old ones.
The problem of many democratic countries, especially Poland, is the low voting turnout. One of the potential reasons is a way of voting: only voting 'for' a party or a candidate is allowed. Possibly, the introduction of voting 'against' could prompt many voters to act. The concept of regulatory focus (Higgins 1998) suggests that people focused on prevention should vote against eagerly. The present article describes two studies conducted to verify that hypothesis. In the first study more than 2/3 of participants declared that they would vote more eagerly when voting for and against would be allowed. The second study shows that the 'pro and anti' formula is especially attractive for participants characterized by regulatory focus on prevention.
This paper examines young adults' orientations to citizenship in Britain, drawing on surveys of random samples of 18-24 year olds. A range of experiences, behaviour and attitudes are explored including: citizenship education, voting, attitude to voting, party affiliation, participation in clubs and societies and engagement with social and political issues. These questions have been asked at a time when citizenship is on many agendas and there is much concern about the apparent apathy of young people regarding local, national and supranational issues. In Britain, some commentators hoped that the advent of a Scottish parliament would help re-engage young people in Scotland with politics and citizenship. This paper compares young people living in Edinburgh, Scotland with young people living in Manchester, an equivalent sized city in England. Like previous research, our data show that while young people are interested in social and political issues they do not focus their concerns on engagement with formal political systems. Many hold negative views about politics, such as feeling that they have little control over what the government does. However, young people's disaffection with voting is somewhat lower in Edinburgh than Manchester despite no greater faith in political parties. This may be an effect of the Scottish parliament. At the same time, young people in Edinburgh are only slightly more likely to be involved in associations and no more likely to be interested in and engaged with a range of wider social and political issues. If there is an effect of devolution on active citizenship, it is, at least for this cohort of young citizens, a very modest one.
The goal of the article is to describe spatial patterns of the 2016 general election voting support on the administrative territory of the city of Košice. The analysis contains parties that exceeded 0.05 thresholds at the national level. The description identifies each party’s territory of voting support, territory of stable voting support (2010 – 2016), and spatial variance. The explanation is based on compositional approach using the Lipset-Rokkan model. The only core-periphery cleavage is markedly present in voting behaviour of Kosice inhabitants. The analysis also shows distinctions in voting support among different parts of the city.
Electoral geographical research into urban territories shows a distinction in voting behaviour between a city centre and its surroundings. A recent exploratory study of the electoral geography of Prague found that distance from the city centre was the variable that best explained the spatial variation of votes, which might follow a concentric pattern and, thus, it recommended seeking a theoretical explanation in urban sociology, e.g. in the Burgess model of the city. Following this recommendation, I compared spatial patterns of voting behaviour in two cities – Warsaw and Prague. Using component analysis, I reduced the number of analysed variables to one for each city representing the main spatial polarisation. In Prague, voting behaviour showed a distinction between the city centre, inner suburbs and outer suburbs. While the city centre and the outer suburbs were conservative, the inner suburbs tended to vote for the left. This partially follows the Burgess model. On the other hand, the electoral geography of Warsaw showed a different structure. In this article I present a way of visualising urban electoral data in maps that avoid distortion caused by varying polygon size.
It is becoming increasingly clear that emotions play a crucial role in voting decisions. This is especially true when it comes to choosing populist parties. This article uses a unique dataset to analyse the interplay between emotions and support for various types of populist parties in Slovakia. It contributes to the discourse by testing the competing hypotheses on what kinds of emotions matter in a post-communist country with multiple types of populist parties. Our results show that although previous studies have tended to concentrate on emotions toward the political or economic situation, feelings toward political leaders actually have greater importance, at least in the Slovak, post-communist context. Our study also indicates that the types of emotions differ depending on whether the populist party has already been in power or not. Contrary to expectations, fear has played a more important role than anger and in general, emotions are more important for right wing and left wing populist parties than for non-populist or centrist populist parties.
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