IParl at the IPSA World Congress of Political Science
by OK
The 26th IPSA World Congress of Political Science was supposed to take place in Lisbon last year. Like many other scientific meetings and congresses, it was cancelled due to the COVID19 pandemic. It will now be held virtually from 10 to 15 July 2021. We are actively participating in this global meeting in a fourfold manner.
Benjamin Höhne and Suzanne S. Schüttemeyer have organized the panel „Candidate Selection and Intra-Party Democracy”. Five presentations are planned, including party studies on Brazil, India and Portugal. Moreover, studies compare the Greens in Western Europe as well as populist developments in Spain and Italy. Pablo Onate (Universitat de València) will comment, on all papers as discussant.
The panel “Key Issues of Legislative Research: Representation, Legislation and Beyond” (chaired by Julia Schwanholz) accepted an IParl paper drawing on data from our SOPiP project. The study, co-authored by Oliver Kannenberg and Danny Schindler, is titled „Elite Domination or Participatory Democracy? Comparing the Rules of the Game within Parliamentary Party Groups“. It investigates how the subject of intra-party group democracy can be conceptualized by relying on standing orders. On this basis, it analyses such different cases as party groups in Finland, Georgia, Latvia or Mexico.
In another IParl paper, Danny Schindler sheds light on the constitutional empowerment of parliamentary oppositions in non-democratic settings („Constitutional foundations of parliamentary opposition power in autocratic and hybrid regimes: The case of Africa”). The panel „Constitutional Transitions to Democracy: Paths and Legacies“ (organized by Florence Larocque und Sung Eun Kim) also looks into data from South Africa, South Korea and the Philippines.
In its role as scientific consultant, the IParl is accompanying project of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) that aims to create a catalogue of indicators for democratic parliaments. At the IPSA congress, the IPU’s Andy Richardson and Sven T. Siefken will chair the corresponding panel „Parliamentary Indicators – Comparative Ways towards Performance Measurement”. In addition, Mr Richardson will present the current draft of the IPU’s catalogue of indicators in his own paper. Danny Schindler will attend this panel (which also studies parliaments in Israel, Japan and the Arab world) as a discussant.