Parliamentary sovereignty and international intervention: elite attitudes in the first Central European legislatures

Abstract

This article investigates the extent to which post-communist political elites favoured the intervention of external organisations in parliamentary work. It draws on data from a survey of parliamentary elites from the beginning of the transition towards democracy in the four Visegrad countries. The results show a much more complex picture than usually assumed, with important variation both between the four legislatures and within the same parliaments. The varying levels of support for external actors' involvement in parliamentary work had different triggering mechanisms connected among other factors to Members’ of Parliament socio-demographic profile, ideological outlook, and the institutional role they envisioned for parliament.

Keywords:

• MPs
• post-communism
• elites
• external organisations
• Central Europe

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Eszter Timar for her valuable comments on previous drafts of this article.

Notes on contributors

Mihail Chiru is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, and a Research Fellow at the Median Research Centre Bucharest. He is mainly interested in legislative behavior, electoral campaigns and party politics. He published several articles in journals such as European Union Politics and The Journal of Legislative Studies and East European Politics and Societies.

Sergiu Gherghina is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Political Science, Goethe University Frankfurt. His research interests lie in party politics in Central and Eastern Europe, legislative and voting behavior, and democratization (with emphasis on direct democracy). His work has been published in American Journal of Political Science, Comparative European Politics, East European Politics and Societies, European Union Politics, Europe-Asia Studies, and International Political Science Review, and Party Politics.

Notes

1. The 2011 electoral reform made the single-member district component, the dominant part of the mixed electoral system as regional lists were abolished.

2. As one cannot assume equal distance between the points of the dependent variable scale, an ordered logistic regression would be more appropriate than dependent variable. We ran all the models using the latter, and the findings are not substantially different from the binary logistic regressions. However, we chose not to present the ordered logistic regression models, because they all violated the assumption of the proportionality of odds.

3. For Slovakia, there was no significant correlation between the independent variables, whereas for Hungary, the correlation between the perceived influence of Nomenklatura and opposition status was .27. For the other two parliaments, the highest correlation is registered, unsurprisingly for extremism and opposition status: .46 in Poland and .38 in the Czech Republic.