Pregled sudske kontrole državne izvršne vlasti

Many analyses and international reports point out that there is a significant lack of judicial control over the state executive power in the Republic of North Macedonia. This article aims to analyze the deficiencies that contribute to the lack of control, and special attention is also devoted to the administrative judiciary as a basic external form of providing judicial control over the legality of the decisions of public authorities and their officials, in order to ensure objective legality, as well as the protection of individual rights of citizens against unlawful administrative acts and actions of public administration. The first part of the article focuses on challenges for judicial control of the executive government. It shows the results of semi-structured interviews conducted with 36 stakeholders such as judges and prosecutors about the limits to judicial control of the executive. The second part focuses on weaknesses and challenges of the administrative judiciary, and makes proposals on how to improve the administrative judiciary as a special type judiciary within the framework of the judicial system of the Republic of North Macedonia. Therefore, it presents a crucial illustration to detect the specific problems and to offer possible solutions.Mnoge analize i međunarodna izvješća ukazuju na to da u Republici Sjevernoj Makedoniji postoji značajan nedostatak sudske kontrole nad izvršnom vlašću države. Ovaj članak ima za cilj analizirati nedostatke koji doprinose nedostatku kontrole, a posebna se pažnja posvećuje i upravnom sudovanju kao osnovnom vanjskom obliku pružanja sudske kontrole zakonitosti odluka državnih tijela i njihovih službenika, kako bi se osigurala objektivna zakonitost, kao i zaštita pojedinačnih prava građana od nezakonitih administrativnih akata i radnji javne uprave. Prvi dio članka fokusiran je na izazove koji se pojavljuju u sudskoj kontroli izvršne vlasti. Iznose se rezultati polu-strukturiranih intervjua provedenih sa 36 sudionika, poput sudaca i tužitelja, o ograničenjima sudske kontrole izvršne vlasti. Drugi dio se fokusira na slabosti i izazove upravnog sudovanja, te daje prijedloge kako poboljšati upravno sudovanje kao posebne vrste sudovanja u okviru pravosudnog sustava Republike Sjeverne Makedonije. U tom smislu nalazi predstavljaju ključnu ilustraciju za otkrivanje specifičnih problema i za pružanje mogućih rješenja

Co-opting religion : how ruling populists in Turkey and Macedonia sacralise the majority

Despite the remarkable scholarly attention to populism and populist parties, the relation between populism and religion remains understudied. Using evidence from two long-term ruling populist parties – Turkey’s Justice and Development Party and Macedonia’s Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity – this study focuses on how and why religion can be an instrument for populist politics at three levels: (i) discursive, (ii) public policy and (iii) institutionalised alliances with religious authorities. The study highlights that religion comes into play at these three levels once populists attain comfortable electoral margins but encounter mounting political and economic challenges that can potentially weaken their grip on power. Ruling populists co-opt and monopolise the majority religion in the name of ‘the people’s will’ as they increasingly undermine democratic legitimacy but they need to justify their systematic crackdown on dissent, the system of checks and balances, the rule of law and minorities. The empirical findings of the study also demonstrate the dual function of religion for populists: its catch-all potential to create cross-class and cross-ethnicity popular support, and its instrumentality to discredit dissent as ‘religiously unfit’ while constructing an antagonism of ‘the people’ versus ‘the elites’

Regulating party politics in the Western Balkans: the legal sources of party system development in Macedonia

<p>Party regulation in general and its systemic consequences in particular have not been a matter of concern for scholars until very recently. Despite recent efforts to study how political parties are regulated in post-authoritarian democracies and in conflict-prone societies, the question of how party legislation affects party formation and party system development in the Western Balkans still remains a mystery. Adopting a multi-disciplinary (that is, legal and political) approach, this article attempts to fill a gap in the literature by analysing how different party (finance) regulations shaped the party system in Macedonia, one of Europe's most recent (and under-researched) democracies, while controlling for changes in electoral regimes. There are two main findings. On the one hand, registration requirements had the strongest impact on the party system format, even when the electoral system pushed in the opposite direction. On the other, public funding, rather than “cartelizing” the system, mainly facilitated the survival of (both big and small) parties. Finally, the article also points to the need to explore the role of shadow financing and corruption when analysing the effects of party finance in new democracies.</p