"Europeanization of the core executive in the transition from circumstances of EU accession to full EU membership"

Only recently have the direct and indirect ‘European’ impacts (of political outcomes at the European level) on domestic political systems started to be studied (i.e. Spanou, 1998; Bulmer and Burch, 1998 and 2001; Kassim, Peters and Wright, eds. 2000; Goetz and Hix, eds. 2001; Knill, 2001; Schneider and Aspinwall, eds. 2001; Goetz, ed., 2001; Laffan, 2001b). For the purpose of our paper, we understand Europeanization processes as the impacts of EU integration on specific countries' political institution-building and institutional adjustments including constitutional and administrative law, as well as on how the political system is organized and operated. This paper focuses on one of the three alternative perspectives of the ‘top-down’ approach to studying the processes of Europeanization as defined by Goetz (2001), namely the linkage perspective. Obviously, for recent new EU member states it is the national administrative adjustments for negotiating accession with the EU that have so far prevailed over national administrative adjustments made in the circumstances of (very recent) full EU membership. Our comparative research of three EU accession states/recent new EU member states, in line with a dynamic view, include Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia. While taking some key common features of the selected countries into account, the countries’ idiosyncrasies including variations in the institutional adaptation of their core executives relying on research findings in the framework of the European project ‘Organizing for Enlargement’ are investigated. Preliminary comparative research findings and tentative conclusions on variables that may cause variations in the adaptation of national administrations to the European integration challenges in the three (otherwise in some respects) relatively similar countries are presented

The Polish Parliament and the making of politics through abortion : nation, gender and democracy in the 1996 Liberalization Amendment Debate

The collapse of communism across East Central Europe was marked by a renewal of debates around reproduction, with abortion debates surfacing in Romania, Germany and Poland. Reproductive politics and more specifically abortion debates typically come to the forefront in times of crisis or societal transformation. Struggles over women's reproductive rights in Poland, as evidenced by continuing debate around the legal status of abortion, are in this postcommunist context intimately related to and bound up with ongoing symbolic and concrete re-definitions of Polish nationhood, identity and citizenship. Focusing on the connections between discourses of Polish nationhood, gender and democracy, this article offers a detailed and critical engagement with debate in the Sejm (the lower chamber of the Polish parliament) during the second reading of the 1996 liberalization of abortion amendment. Using a discourse analysis methodology, the article argues that abortion is a symbolic issue through which anxieties about postcommunist reform are raised, nationalist pasts and futures are imagined and through which political projects are articulated

Designing Redress: A Study About Grievances Against Public Bodies

How grievances against public bodies are resolved is important not only for the individuals concerned and the decision-makers complained about but also to the whole system of government. People need to have confidence that when things go wrong, they will be put right. There is a general public interest in that being done in accordance with constitutional principles and in ways that are effective and efficient. Over many years, a great variety of different ?mechanisms? for dealing with grievances have been created, ranging from internal complaints processes through to the work of external bodies (including ombudsmen, tribunals and courts). This project has focused on how mechanisms are designed. The study explores how different mechanisms can be thought of as relating to each other. It also looks at the various reasons why mechanisms have to be designed. Drawing on interviews with people involved in the design process and analysis of public information, a map of where the activity of designing redress has been created. Evaluating the ?administrative justice landscape?, two particular deficiencies emerge: there is no strong political or official leadership in relation to how mechanisms ought to be designed and the system is fragmented, with many different people, in various organisations all contributing to design activities. Might a toolkit of guiding principles for designing redress be one way of achieving a better design process and outcomes? A number of principles are proposed in this report, and the authors hope to engage stakeholders in a debate about how this might best be taken forward

Legislative Organization and Administrative Redundancy

Congress regularly enacts legislation providing for redundant administrative programs. For example, there are more than 100 federal programs for surface transportation, 82 programs to ensure teacher quality, 80 programs to promote domestic economic development, and 47 programs to provide employment and job-training services. Recent high-profile legislation–-such as the financial-industry reform measure and the health-care reform measure–-add new programs without repealing existing ones directed at the same policy goals. Prior academic analyses generally have not considered why Congress pursues redundancy. This article addresses that question through both theoretical and institutional analysis. The article first constructs an organizational theory that attributes redundancy in administrative programs to the congressional committee system. Specifically, the article demonstrates that two critical components of the existing committee system-–fragmented jurisdictions and parliamentary prerogatives–-systematically bias legislative outcomes in favor of redundancy. Building on leading theoretical accounts of congressional committees from political science, the article then presents a novel cost-benefit analysis of this tendency toward redundancy. It shows that redundancy allows legislators to increase distributive favors for constituents and interest groups but that redundancy is also linked to the desirable pursuit of informational efficiency. Thus, the institutional structures facilitating redundancy have mixed effects. Consequently, the article describes and analyzes specific institutional reforms that trade off the distributive costs and the informational benefits associated with redundancy. One approach would subject more legislative decisions to external advisory processes such as that used to close unneeded military facilities. A second and more promising approach would preserve existing committee jurisdictions but would scale back committees’ parliamentary prerogatives, thereby encouraging redundancy in program design but discouraging redundancy in program implementation

Does Political Reservation Affect Voting Behavior? Empirical Evidence from India

Using microdata from the National Election Study of the 2004 parliamentary elections in India, we empirically examine the impact of political reservation for disadvantaged castes and tribes on voting behavior. We find that in a reserved constituency, where only members of the disadvantaged castes can stand for election, voters of the disadvantaged castes are encouraged to vote. On the other hand, the system of constituency reservation does not have any impact on the turnout of voters belonging to other groups, including relatively upper caste voters. These voters, however, tend to change political party to vote for in reserved constituencies. These findings imply that there is a general acceptance of political reservation in the Indian electoral system.Political Reservation, Voter Turnout, Castes, India

Legitimizing global economic governance through transnational parliamentarization: The parliamentary dimensions of the WTO and the World Bank

This paper discusses the potential contribution of parliamentary institutions and networks to the democratization of global economic governance. It places the analysis in the context of the larger debate on the democratic deficit of international economic institutions, in particular the WTO. On a theoretical level, the paper distinguishes different notions of legitimacy and democracy in order to identify which aspects of democratic legitimacy of global economic governance can be addressed through transnational parliamentarization. It is argued that national parliaments must react to the emergence of global economic governance in a multi-level system through new forms of transnational parliamentarization. In its empirical part, the paper assesses the Parliamentary Conference on the WTO (PCWTO) and the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank (PNoWB) as two examples of such transnational parliamentarization. Drawing on the theory of deliberative democracy the paper argues that the contribution of these settings to democratic global governance should not be measured on the basis of their formal decision-making power but with regard to their role as fora for transnational discourses and on their potential to empower national parliamentarians. -- Das Arbeitspapier untersucht den potentiellen Beitrag von parlamentarischen Institutionen und Netzwerken zur Demokratisierung des internationalen Wirtschaftssystems. Es stellt die Analyse in den Kontext der allgemeinen Debatte über das Demokratiedefizit der globalen Wirtschaftsinstitutionen, insbesondere der WTO. Auf theoretischer Ebene unterscheidet das Arbeitspapier verschiedene Konzeptionen von Legitimität und Demokratie, um herauszufiltern, welche Anforderungen demokratischer Legitimität durch Prozesse der transnationalen Parlamentarisierung erfüllt werden können. Das Arbeitspapier argumentiert, dass nationale Parlamente auf die Emergenz globaler Wirtschaftsinstitutionen im Mehrebenensystem durch neue Formen der transnationalen Parlamentarisierung reagieren müssen. In seinem empirischen Teil bewertet das Arbeitspapier die Parlamentarische Konferenz zur WTO (Parliamentary Conference on the WTO, PCWTO) und das Parlamentarische Netzwerk zur Weltbank (Parliamentary Network on the World Bank, PNoWB) als zwei Beispiele einer derartigen transnationalen Parlamentarisierung. Unter Rückgriff auf die Theorie der deliberativen Demokratie wird argumentiert, dass der Beitrag dieser Einrichtungen zu demokratischer gobal governance nicht anhand ihrer formalen Entscheidungsbefugnisse gemessen werden sollte, sondern mit Blick auf ihre Rolle als Foren für transnationale Diskurse und ihr Potential nationale Parlamentarier zu stärken.