Germany

Lindner, Ralf; Schultze, Rainer-Olaf

doi:10.5771/9783845223414-723

Cited by 17 publications

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“…There, too, communist authority was legitimized through parliamentary elections that were organized and controlled by the Party. 19 In Poland, the next parliamentary elections were held under different political conditions. Namely, following the complete elimination of all opposition to the regime and the total domination of the Polish political scene by the communists, who, following the absorption of the Polish Socialist Party by the Polish Workers' Party in December 1948, created the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR being the Polish acronym), which ruled the country with absolute power for the next forty-one years.…”

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Were Elections in the Socialist Countries Elections at All? The Case of Elections to the Sejm in Communist-Ruled Poland

Siedziako

2022

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The article presents the current state of research into parliamentary elections in Poland during the period of communist rule. The author outlines the development of the electoral system of the Polish People’s Republic in the 1940s and 50s, and also analyses its singular features in the years when elections to the Sejm were fully controlled by the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party. The final part of the paper is devoted to elections in the 1980s, when this electoral model collapsed, thereby contributing to the disintegration of the communist dictatorship in Poland.

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Were Elections in the Socialist Countries Elections at All? The Case of Elections to the Sejm in Communist-Ruled Poland

Siedziako

2022

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Parliaments in Time

Koß¹

2018

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This book sheds light on the institutional development of four (emerging) Western European parliaments. Parliaments in Western Europe are noteworthy for several reasons. Their institutional designs differ remarkably, with distinct consequences for their policy output. Scholars have diagnosed the decline of legislatures for over a century now. Based on a model of distributive bargaining over legislative procedures, this book engages in a comparative process-tracing analysis of ninety reforms, which restructured control over the plenary agenda and committee power in Britain, France, Sweden, and Germany between 1866 and 2015. The analysis presented suggests that legislators in Western Europe rationalize procedures as a response to growing levels of legislative workload. As a consequence, legislatures evolve towards one of two procedural ideal types: talking or working legislatures. In talking legislatures, governments enjoy privileges in legislative agenda-setting (resulting in centralized agenda control) and committees are weak. In contrast, working legislatures combine decentralized agenda control with powerful committees. Which path legislators chose is determined by the appearance of anti-system obstruction. If anti-system parties obstruct legislative business, legislators surrender ancient procedural privileges and agree to a centralization of agenda control. Otherwise, their demand for legislative mega-seats on committees triggers the evolution of working legislatures. If legislators fail to respond to an anti-system threat, legislative procedures break down. For this reason, the central aim of procedural reforms in Western European parliaments is to maintain legislative democracy. Rather than a decline of legislatures, for talking legislatures to successfully overcome an anti-system threat indicates the resilience of legislative democracy.

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Koß

2018

Parliaments in Time

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Germany

Cited by 17 publications

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Were Elections in the Socialist Countries Elections at All? The Case of Elections to the Sejm in Communist-Ruled Poland

Were Elections in the Socialist Countries Elections at All? The Case of Elections to the Sejm in Communist-Ruled Poland

Parliaments in Time

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