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On 8 June, the Interparliamentary Union presented a catalogue of indicators for democratic parliaments based on the Sustainable Development Goals 16.6. and 16.7. and comprising almost 500 individual criteria. The compilation process has been accompanied by IParl since 2019. The catalogue is intended to help parliaments worldwide to assess their own capabilities and, on this basis, to improve the conditions for democratic governance.

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On 27 June 2022, the Office of the European Parliament, the Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics at the University of Wroclaw, in partnership with the Institute for Parliamentary Research, is organising a workshop on "Representative Democracy in Times of Crisis: Challenges and Opportunities". Registrations for the hybrid workshop are still open.

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The 2022 Thesis Prize for Parliamentary Law of the French National Assembly was awarded to Claire Bloquet for the thesis: "On the outskirts of the French Parliament: The Delegation for Women’s Rights. A sociology of the National Assembly and legislative work" (Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). The award ceremony is planned for spring 2023. We congratulate Claire on this outstanding achievement.

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The digitalization of human life has impacted many aspects of politics in the last two decades. Intra-party decision-making is one of them. However, not much is known about how intra-party selectorates evaluate the digitalization of a crucial decision-making process. Claire Bloquet, Isabelle Borucki and Benjamin Höhne ask whether party members who participate in candidate selection support online consultations - or not.

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The world has faced major global crises during the last years: the financial and the climate crises, the Covid-19 pandemic and most recently the war on Ukraine. These situations are often understood as a natural “hour of the executive”, and this created new challenges for parliaments. The goal of the workshop in Taipeh, Taiwan, is to understand how parliaments can respond to crises, uphold their influence, and how this can support public understanding and institutional trust.

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A new chapter in German history begins with the country’s first three-party coalition government since the 1950s, the ‘Ampel’ coalition, emerging from the 2021 elections. The seminar, sponsored by the AICGS and the IParl, will focus on the challenges ahead, using the new coalition as departure point for considering current developments as well as the long-term evolution of German political institutions and political culture. Please submit your proposals until March 14, 2022.

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Benjamin Höhne writes about the fundamental processes of candidate selection in Germany, the role of the parties and future challenges in his contribution to the edited volume by Thibault Muzergues and Dan Scadutoder. The publication of the International Republican Institute (IRI) brings together ten case studies on the selection of parliamentary candidates. The volume is freely available on the IRI site.

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What spurs or hampers contested district nominations for the Bundestag? Our new article provides some answers: Determinants for competitive conferences are a vacant candidacy, extra-parliamentary parties, and the involvement of several regional party units. Interestingly, there is a vast demand for more contested nominations among the selectorates. However, some ‘coronations’ are caused by early withdrawals of aspirants due to the leadership’s influence.

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In "Government & Opposition", Benjamin Höhne analyses the AfD's intra-party democracy (IPD). On a broad empirical basis of the #BuKa2017 project as well as self-developed measurement methods, he shows that the AfD has a "competitive IPD". This is significantly more pronounced than in the other six parties in the Bundestag, even compared to the participation-oriented Greens.

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The left-wing movement "Aufstehen" was a political experiment that received a lot of media attention in a relatively short period of time. In his article, Benjamin Höhne traces the development of the self-proclaimed movement, places it in the German party landscape and draws conclusions from its rapid failure for new "movement parties" in Germany.