IParl Viewpoint

The next Bundestag will be elected according to a new Bundestag electoral law, which has been confirmed in key points by the Federal Constitutional Court. Daniel Hellmann sheds light on what the Federal Constitutional Court has confirmed and what it has rejected in the second IParl Current Focus.

Are East Germans over- or under-represented among the candidates from the perspective of proportional representation - i.e. descriptively? How has this developed over time? And is the attribution "East German party" also reflected in the candidate portfolio? Daniel Hellmann provides answers to these questions in the new IParl Viewpoint with data from the CandiData project.

How can MEPs actually be excluded from their parliamentary groupings? Recent developments in the European Parliament show that this question can be of considerable political importance. In the 14th IParl Viewpoint, Jasper Nebel, Danny Schindler and Oliver Kannenberg compare the rules and regulations of almost 100 political groups from 15 countries.

The reorganisation of the Bundestag electoral system has caused political controversy in recent months. But how does the new electoral law work and what is it good for? Which problems are solved and which new ones are raised? Daniel Hellmann sheds light on this in the 13th IParl Viewpoint.

Article 49.3 allows the government to pass laws without the approval of the National Assembly - as was the case with the controversial adoption of the pension reform last spring. The number of cases in which this procedure has been used has risen sharply since autumn 2022. The Focus looks at the questions of where this constitutional norm comes from, how it has been used in the past and explains the reasons for its importance in today's French political landscape.

Article 49.3 of the French Constitution enables the government to pass bills without the consent of the National Assembly, something regularly commented upon. Traditionally of rare occurrence, the number of its uses has skyrocketed in the past year, and even got wide media coverage when it was used to pass a controversial pension reform last spring. This issue of the Blickpunkt takes a deeper look into what this procedure actually is, whereit comes from, how it was used historically, and explains the reasons of its newfound relevance in nowadays French political configuration, as well as its risks for parliamentary democracy.

MPs leaving their parliamentary group in the middle of a parliamentary term is still a rarity in Germany, and a parliamentary split all the more so. Nevertheless, a new IParl dataset on changes in parliamentary group membership at federal and state level shows that one or more MPs have (un)voluntarily left their parliamentary group in almost every parliamentary term over the past three decades.

The representational performance of the House of Lords is discussed according to the categories developed in the research. The question is therefore: How is representation organised in the British case (procedure)? Which groups in society are represented, both descriptively and symbolically (representation)? Which interests prevail (content)? The process
on the appointment of the House of Lords proves to be unfinished and contradictory.

As part of the new IParl research project CandiData, the range of candidates put forward by the parties for parliamentary elections in Germany is being analysed longitudinally. In this issue of Blickpunkt, the project is presented and, as a first step, the question of how high the renewal rate of the parties, understood as the proportion of newcomers among all candidates, is: around six out of ten nominees are standing for the first time, which is not a sign of the decline of parties that is often talked about.

According to the Berlin Constitutional Court, the preparation and conduct of the Berlin elections in September 2021 were marred by such a large number of electoral errors that they had to be declared completely invalid and repeated. Wolfgang Zeh discusses the extent to which this court decision should be seen as an "encroachment on correctly acquired parliamentary mandates" and whether the current handling of errors may do more harm than good in the new Blickpunkt aktuell.

The question of whether heads of state governments benefit from an incumbency bonus has hardly been analysed to date: The hypothesis that incumbent prime ministers lose comparatively rarely in state elections has so far remained untested. The new Blickpunkt report examines whether it is possible to speak of an incumbency bonus at state level and which factors are increasingly associated with being voted out or re-elected.

The next President of the Fifth Republic will be elected in France on 10 and 24 April. Numerous people want to stand for election. The Focus shows how the candidates for the elections were selected and examines the question of why the Socialists (PS) and Conservatives (LR) abandoned the method of open primaries, while the Greens (EELV) adhered to this procedure.

Although decisions by second chambers can have a considerable impact on the political process, they are not often at the centre of public attention. Franziska Carstensen addresses this gap for the European area and asks how representation in second chambers is standardised under constitutional law, which modes of appointment exist, but also which partial renewal options are provided for through (in)direct elections.

The East African country of Tanzania has come to the attention of the German public in recent months due to the re-election of a coronavirus-sceptical president and his surprising death. The elections to the National Assembly in October 2020, on the other hand, have gone largely unnoticed. Against this backdrop, the spotlight sheds light on the development of election results in Tanzanian parliamentary elections since 1995.

Our fourth spotlight by Benjamin Höhne and Svenja Samstag examines how the question of gender equality in parliaments can be answered in the future. Now that parity laws have failed for the time being, other approaches are needed. The ball is back in the political parties' court. There is no shortage of implementation options, starting with voluntary quotas for women.

Following his election victory last year and a historically difficult assumption of office, the new US President Joe Biden has been shaping US politics for 100 days. For our third "IParl Viewpoint", Michael Kolkmann (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg) takes stock and sheds light on Biden's substantive and personal choices as well as the institutional context.

The 2020 US presidential election has been overshadowed by Donald Trump's accusation that the Democrats stole his victory by postal vote. This development, which is detrimental to the democratic process, should serve as an opportunity to ask how secure postal voting is in Germany? Is electoral fraud and voting errors by postal vote to be expected in the coming super election year?

According to many observers, the outbreak of the novel coronavirus was the "hour of the executive", in which the government had to quickly demonstrate its ability to act. Scrutinising the government is one of the most important tasks of the Bundestag. Opposition parties in particular use formal rights of scrutiny as a publicity tool in order to profile themselves as an alternative to the government. In its first Blickpunkt issue, the IParl shows the extent to which the parliamentary opposition made use of its control options in coronavirus times and what conclusions it should (not) draw from this.