Parlamentarisk og lovgivende praksis

Lobbying is not only the subject of ongoing, heated debates in politics and the public sphere but has also been a focus of the social sciences for decades. This edited volume provides an overview of the current state of research on lobbying from the perspective of Public Choice as a subfield of political science and economics. After a brief introduction to the field, Part I provides an overview of basic concepts and political-economic theories of lobbying from the standpoints of various subfields of Public Choice. Subsequently, Part II investigates the various channels used by interest groups to influence policymakers, such as party donations, informational lobbying, hiring politicians, etc. These chapters also discuss the possibilities and limits of regulating the respective channels. Lastly, Part III sheds light on lobbying in selected regions (i.e., the United States, European Union, Russia, and China).

This unique and timely book offers a synthesis, analysis, and evaluation of education-related rulings of the US Supreme Court from 2005 to the present. Throughout the course of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century, the Supreme Court issued rulings, which frequently vacillate based on the political composition of the justices who sit on the bench. Chapters will cover both an overview of the role of Supreme Court rulings in school policy and the court¿s transformation in the late twentieth century into the present day. These themes will be converted into robust chapters which will provide a legal analysis of the Roberts Court years, and an evaluation of the jurisprudence and its practical effect on public schools.

This book on the politics of electoral reform in Central Europe since 1989 explains by whom, why, and how the electoral rules were changed in Central Europe in the post-Communist period. Examining the contextual factors affecting, underlying, and/or initiating these changes, the book identifies main actors, their motivations, and other circumstances surrounding the electoral reform processes. It further explores their political consequences, particularly on proportionality and personalization.Based on a detailed analysis of electoral reform processes in Czechoslovakia, Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia over the past thirty years, the book discusses how the politics of electoral reform in Central Europe is mostly driven, controlled, and decided by politicians, with other actors being either overlooked or ignored. Finally, it argues that most of the cases were imposed by an elite majority, with the sole exception of the Czech Republic, where the politics of electoral reform were influenced by the intervention of the constitutional court as an external actor.The book will appeal to students, researchers, and scholars of political science interested in a better understanding of electoral politics in general, as well as democratic transformation processes and electoral reform in Central Europe.

Dieses aufschlussreiche Buch beschreibt, wo und wie sich die Macht heute in Deutschland tatsächlich verteilt. Obwohl Art. 20 Abs. 2 GG noch genauso lautet wie 1949, hat sich das Verhältnis zwischen Exekutive, Legislative und Judikative zum Teil stark verändert. Beispielsweise ist das Bundesverfassungsgericht im Verhältnis zum Bundestag tendenziell mächtiger geworden und treibt das Parlament durch bahnbrechende Entscheidungen immer wieder vor sich her ¿ vom Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung über das ¿3. Geschlecht¿ bis hin zum Klimaschutz. Zudem spielen internationale Player eine immer größere Rolle: War das Grundgesetz vor 75 Jahren die höchste Rechtsnorm in Deutschland, bestreitet mittlerweile kein Jurist mehr ernsthaft den Vorrang von EU-Recht vor der deutschen Verfassung. Dieser informative Einblick in die komplexe Welt des Rechts stellt anschaulich dar, wie sich der Inhalt von Gesetzen trotz identischem Wortlaut verändern kann.

Dieser Band analysiert das Selbstverständnis politischer Berater bezüglich ihrer Rolle in politischen Beratungsprozessen sowie ihre Sicht auf die Maßstäbe für die Legitimität und Legalität unterschiedlicher Beratungsvorgänge im politischen Entscheidungsprozess in Deutschland und Polen im Vergleich. Zudem werden auch weitere Aspekte aus dem Bereich der Politikberatung und Lobbyismus, wie die zunehmende Rolle der Medien in Beratungsprozessen, die Unterschiede in der Struktur und Beratungsressourcen der Abgeordnetenbüros, die Wahrnehmung des sogenannten ¿Drehtür-Effekts¿ in beiden Ländern sowie die Möglichkeiten der Bürgerbeteiligung an politischen Konsultationsprozessen, aufgegriffen.

«Rainäs documentation provides invaluable insight into the high-powered and high-level political calculations that made it happen. It is perhaps the most signal achievement of the era and this expertly curated collection on its genesis and evolution is unquestionably of permanent value.»(Professor Marc Mulholland, Professor of Modern History, Oxford)This is the second volume in which Peter Raina presents the Blair government¿s Devolution papers. Here, the focus shifts to Northern Ireland in the midst of the «Troubles» ¿ a situation where discrimination and bigotry in a society divided by religious and national affiliations had erupted into hatred, violence and fear.Tony Blair, his minister Mo Mowlam and a team of civil servants and others reached for American help and worked intensely with Gerry Adams, Leader of Sinn Fein, and with the government of the Republic in the South of Ireland to bring the warring factions together. Their efforts were concentrated into an astonishing single month.The Devolution plans, as such, have not stood the test of time but, with effort from all sides, a fragile truce was achieved and a virtual end to the «Troubles». This was an enormous achievement. The papers are an object lesson in how patient diplomacy and negotiation can work, even in the most intractable of situations.

In 1987 Tony Blair¿s New Labour won a landslide victory in the British elections. To show it meant business, the new government immediately embarked on a major legislative programme, granting devolution to the outlying «Regions» joined with England in the UK. The cabinet papers concerned with this initiative have just been released, and Peter Raina is publishing them, with brief commentaries, in two volumes. This one concerns Scotland and Wales.The papers show just how much interdepartmental work was involved in this comparatively modest exercise, and how dependent ministers were on the Civil Service and their legal teams. They also raise questions which have recently been much amplified. The drive for devolution had contradictory aims ¿ to offer more self-sufficiency and foster development; but also to take the sting out of nationalist movements, so as to preserve the Union. Readers can judge how democratic and how fruitful the scheme really was.

This book offers a systematic, theory-based, and empirically grounded introduction to the political system of Germany. Compared to other textbooks on government and politics in Germany, it has two particular benefits. First, it analyzes the individual dimensions of the German political system from a uniform theoretical perspective based on the well-known distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy. Second, it particularly explains how political decision-making in the multi-level system takes place, including the local, state, federal as well as EU levels. This way, the book provides a comprehensive, detailed, and clear picture of how German democracy is organized and how it works.

This book uses settler colonialism, critical race, and tribal critical race theories to examine the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous and Black disproportionality in the criminal justice systems of the English-speaking Western liberal democracies of the UK, USA, Canada, and Australia. It argues that the colonial legacies of the respective countries established a set of subjugating strategies that continue to manifest today in criminal justice disproportionality. Erroneously thought of as a concluded historical event, the modern manifestation of the subjugating strategies is embodied in punitive law enforcement actions disproportionately targeting Indigenous and Black bodies. This book examines how we got to this point in history, opening the door for a discourse on how we might untether the respective criminal justice systems from their colonial practices in the name of social justice. Finally, the book offers educational opportunities for sociologists, criminologists, social workers, criminal justice reform advocates, and other stakeholders.

This book is a timely examination of congressional oversight in the United States, serving as a definitive guide for scholars and political, legal, and media observers seeking to navigate contemporary conflicts between Congress and the White House. Author Daniel Epstein has spent his professional career as a lawyer serving all sides of the regulatory process: he ran investigations for Congress, defended the White House from congressional oversight, and represented individuals, nonprofit news organizations, and entrepreneurs in federal court to fight for regulatory transparency and fairness. Epstein uses historical and observational data to argue that the modern federal bureaucracy did not begin as a regulatory state but as an investigative state. The contemporary picture of Congress having empowered the bureaucracy to set policy through rules is a relatively recent development in the political development of administrative law. The book¿s novel econometric models and historical analyses force a shift in how legal scholars and judges understand delegation, congressional oversight, and agency investigations.

This book aims to develop a conceptual framework upon which to draw for analysis of new and existing national reforms in Australia. Due to growth in the volume and complexity of national uniform legislation, law reform agencies, the Commonwealth, state and territory governments and policy institutions have more, rather than less, to do. This book explores how they are required to respond to debates among actors from divergent geographical, commercial and ideological backgrounds, who sometimes demonstrate irreconcilable differences in values and perspectives.From a policy implication perspective, this book summarises a vast quantity of original and complex data so that it can be applied in the field-among policymakers, reformers, legislative drafters, students and the wider audience of legal practitioners working with harmonised legislation in federations. This book acknowledges that uniform legislation is not a panacea for all legal challenges currently faced by federations. However, this book takes a step towards demystifying the many confusing factors that have obscured the underlying general principles. A working theory of 'federal harmonisation' enables 'the art of the impossible' to become a practical reality. This book condenses data on legislation in models. The models enable transparent, evidence-based decisions in the process of a federation's harmonisation to progress regulatory best practices and achieve more reliable, sustainable results.

This book presents a new approach to the analysis of political psychology, political culture, and communication.Using data from Japanese political interviews and parliamentary deliberations, it reveals how Japanese politicians address their audience. In addition to analyzing the use of verbal political rhetoric, the book shows that nonverbal communication is highly relevant as well. In a context where political leaders are becoming increasingly important, identifying the techniques used by Japanese politicians ¿ especially facial expressions, hand gestures, and other forms of body language ¿ to gain support from the audience, leads us to consider communication practices of political leaders around the world. Politicians adopt different communication styles based on their specific electoral system. The more single-seat constituency political candidates use rhetoric, the greater their chance of appealing to voters. In addition, the use of personal experiencesand others' speech quotations function as effective political rhetoric, further attracting the audience¿s attention. In short, this book presents a more comprehensive and holistic picture of political ¿rhetoric¿ than usually offered by other studies of political communication.

This research monograph examines presidential constitutional conventions and the role they play in the political systems of four Central European countries ¿ the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland. As primarily unwritten rules of constitutional practice, constitutional conventions represent political arrangements and as such are political in origin. Not only this, constitutional conventions, in general, and presidential constitutional conventions, in particular, have signi¿cant political implications. They shape both the everyday operation and character of regimes. Central Europe represents a particularly useful example on which this role of constitutional conventions can be studied and assessed.

This book examines the statecraft of former UK Prime Minister, Theresa May as a means of deconstructing her leadership of the United Kingdom. Alongside the inescapable issue of Brexit that dominated her Premiership, it takes a wider view of her record in government by looking at how and why she stood for the leadership of the Conservative Party; scrutinizes her approach to economic, social, and foreign policy; interrogates her attitudes towards Northern Ireland and the DUP; and her longstanding records on race relations, LGBT+ issues, and feminism, as well as more traditional concerns such as faith, constitution, and Britishness. This volume is the first of its kind to adopt such a systematic approach in its evaluation of May¿s leadership.

The textbook introduces the self-understanding, institutional structure and practice of the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany. The work provides a problem-oriented overview of the basic constitutional and foreign policy decisions that have constituted German democracy; the political field of forces formed by interest groups, citizens' initiatives, parties and mass media; the political institutions at the federal, state and local levels; the social reach and administrative enforcement of political decisions; the political culture including the structure of the political ruling class. The new edition also addresses, among other things, the consequences of the Corona crisis for the political system, the changing party system and the crisis of the EU after the 2021 federal election.

This book analyzes United Nations (UN) interventions in the process of constitution making in states undergoing political change. It combines theoretical considerations of democracy and constitutionalism with empirical experiences and takes a critical perspective on the interventions developed by the United Nations in the processes of re-democratization. Presenting new empirical evidence on the substantive and procedural way in which the UN undertakes constitution building in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan, and East Timor, the book illustrates difficulties of these practices such as the promotion of popular participation, as well as an increasing Westernization, and to meet local needs. In consequence, the authors call for reforms of the actions and structural methods the UN to better align a legitimate constitutional order with the rule of law and democratic values. This book is aimed at scholars and students of politics and law who are interested in the prerequisites and conditions for further democratization in states undergoing political transformation.

This book assembles eight chapters by respected and emerging scholars in political science, sociology, and psychology to produce a sustained look at the wide range of identity politics in the 2020 US National Election and the lessons for 2024. These chapters emerged from papers presented at the American Elections Symposium held at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in March of 2021; six edited volumes have been produced based on research presented at previous conferences. They apply an impressive diversity of theoretical explanations and methodological approaches to explore the factors that shape American elections, and what impact it could have in the future of diversity and democracy.

This book analyses the presidentialization of parties in three countries of the post-Soviet space - Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan - and the role of this phenomenon in their recent political history. The concept of presidentialization of politics means that parties tend to adjust by becoming ¿presidentialised¿ in the sense that parties delegate their leaders-as- Presidents to shape both their electoral and governing strategies. The presidentialization of parties refers to institutional resources, constraints and opportunities. It can be also described both as centralization of leadership and a style of government, overlapping with that of personalization of politics that it consists of personal characteristics, attitudes, personal capital and charisma in making politics, instead. Since their introduction, the concept of presidentialization have been mostly analysed within the Western or other democratic countries. Very little attention, however, has been paid to the phenomenon presidentialization of political parties in non-democratic countries or in countries with a transitional form of government . This volume enhances our theoretical understanding of the political role of the Presidents of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus in controlling the legislative space and elected officials.

This book analyses the systematic and procedural issues that are faced by women in the Parliament and brings to light the systematic ignorance of certain issues supported by data on the Parliamentary Debates, Question Hours and functioning of Parliamentary Committees. Combining these technical issues with substantive legal arguments in favour of gender mainstreaming, this book acts as a tool of strategic advantage for policymakers, legislators, advocates and researchers. This work unearths not only the problem areas of the research theme, but also dedicates a solution which relies on effective monitoring techniques used globally, specifically to achieve the SDGs in the field of Nutrition, Family Planning and Sexual and Reproductive Health.

This book is the first detailed analysis of how the EU responded to Brexit. It is an important reference point for future studies of the Brexit negotiations. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with key institutional players in Brussels and in several member states to document how the EU handled the first-ever exit of one of its members. The Brexit shock came at a time when the EU had barely recovered from the Euro crisis and was struggling to manage an unprecedented inflow of refugees. The immediate fear was that Brexit might be the final straw that broke the camel ¿s back.Eurosceptics were jubilant, and Europhiles were distraught. In reality, the EU reacted to Brexit with resolve and a determination to protect the polity. The book argues that getting the process right was crucial. The EU mobilised its collective capacity to negotiate effectively and with one voice.

This monograph discusses the role of political parties in Paraguay¿s legislature. Using Paraguay as a case study, the author analyzes the phenomenon of legislative chaos. While chaos has been expected to exist in legislatures since at least 1785 (Arrow 1951; Condorcet 1785), this phenomenon has not been observable in real-world legislatures for much of history (Tullock 1967; Tullock and Brennan 1981). By showing that chaos exists in Paraguay, and by then proposing a way to incorporate chaos into existing legislative theories, this volume creates a model that is more generalizable to different legislative contexts than what currently exists. Providing a robust theoretical contribution to the study of both legislative politics and Paraguay¿s political system, this book will appeal to researchers and students studying legislative behavior and Latin American politics.

The European Union, as a regulatory polity based on integration through law, arguably relies more on legal compliance with its policies than any other political system. Proceeding from this point of departure, this book puts the spotlight on the subnational tier and scrutinizes its role in ensuring compliance. Drawing on a dataset of infringement proceedings against federal and regionalized member states, the book shows that strong shared rule, i.e., strong cooperation between national and subnational authorities, can improve national compliance records. In contrast, policy sectors with strong redistributive consequences impair subnational authorities' capacity to comply.  In short, policy and politics matter more than polity. 

This book evaluates the legislative effectiveness of Nigeriäs National Assembly under the Fourth Republic. The assessment covers five Assemblies (4th¿8th) and focuses specifically on lawmaking, cost of running the National Assembly, and the budget making process. It empirically assesses the effectiveness of the Nigerian national legislature beyond previous emotional and sentimental evaluations of the institution. It has developed a model ¿Institutional Legislative Effectiveness Score¿ used in assessing the institutional performance of the National Assembly from two perspectives: first, by comparing the performances of the two chambers in the same Assembly; and second, by comparing the performances of the institution across Assemblies. Aside lawmaking, the book also covers the major topical issues that characterized public evaluation of the institution. These include: size of the institution, budgeting process, cost of funding the institution, and the debate on the appropriate way in reforming the National Assembly.

The book provides various EdgeAI concepts related to its architecture, key performance indicators, and enabling technologies after introducing algorithmic government, large-scale decision-making, and computing issues in the cloud and fog. With advancements in technology, artificial intelligence has permeated our personal lives and the fields of economy, socio-culture, and politics. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into decision-making for public services is changing how governments operate worldwide. This book discusses how algorithms help the government in various ways, including virtual assistants for busy civil servants, automated public services, and algorithmic decision-making processes. In such cases, the implementation of algorithms will occur on a massive scale and possibly affect the lives of entire communities. The cloud-centric architecture of artificial intelligence brings out challenges of latency, overhead communication, and significant privacy risks. Due to the sheer volume of data generated by IoT devices, the data analysis must be performed at the forefront of the network. This introduces the need for edge computing in algorithmic government. EdgeAI, the confluence of edge computing and AI, is the primary focus of this book. It also discusses how one can incorporate these concepts in algorithmic government through conceptual framework and decision points. Finally, the research work emphasizes some design challenges in edge computing from applications viewpoint. This book will be helpful for data engineers, data scientists, cloud engineers, data management experts, public policymakers, administrators, research scholars and academicians.