Izvorni znanstveni članak
POLITICAL PLURALISM AND CONSTITUTIONAL/LEGAL STATUS OF POLITICAL PARTIES
Dragutin Lalović
; Fakultet političkih znanosti Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
Constitutional-formative status of political parties and political pluralism has a major impact on shaping political will in democracies. Croatia, as a country caught in the process of a (democratic and liberal) transition to democracy, must carefully contemplate how to constitutionally institutionalize i.e. legally secure recognition for political parties as the key actors in shaping peoples’ political will, but at the same time by laws to legally and precisely restrain the scope and methods of their activity. In line with this, the author analyses and evaluates the experience of the Italian First republic and the French Fifth republic. Namely, the constitutional standardization of political parties in those regimes took place in, for us, comparable social and political circumstances of the so-called extreme and polarized pluralism which, according to Sartori, inevitably leads to a deeplyseated crisis or even a civil war. While the Italian Constitution of 1947 recognizes that centrifugal type of political pluralism, the French Constitution of the Fifth republic of 1958 envisages the function of its political parties in the same manner in order to overcome the polarized pluralism of the Fourth republic. The Italian Constitution defines political parties as instruments above the state, providing guidance (“they determine the national politics”), while the French Constitution reduces their function to the electoral process and stipulates that they have to respect national sovereignty i.e. they have to be a “democratic” influence in the state, ancillary political participants in the democratic political process. The constitutional changes which established the Croatian Third republic meant that the French institutional arrangement (semi-presidential plurality system) was renounced as a way of overcoming the party dynamics of polarizational type. If the French Fifth republic was a response to the impasse of the Fourth republic’s “regime of parties”, why was Croatia’s Second republic (1990-2000) forsworn and the Third republic instituted, modelled after the unequivocally failed regime of the French Fourth republic?
Ključne riječi
democratic state; Croatia’s Third republic; Fifth republic; political pluralism; political parties; constitution
Hrčak ID:
24332
URI
Datum izdavanja:
4.4.2002.
Posjeta: 3.880 *