Search results for "Presidential system"

Constitutionalism and the Presidency in the Russian Federation

2003

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has emphasized the idea that the state should be a leading actor in post-Communist reconstruction. This chapter argues that constitutionalism, in the narrow meaning of the rule of law in the political process, coexists with a mildly authoritarian, state-oriented presidential regime such as the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin. In Russian discourse, political reconstruction has been seen as cynical ‘political technology’ and Putin’s way to power is the primary example of such a kind of technology. The constitution and its interpretation by the Russian Constitutional Court give vast powers to the president. Under Yeltsin some attempts by the Duma …

Rhetorical Questions as Orator’s Means of Addressing the National Spirit of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians in Presidential Speeches

2020

Retorika kā pārliecināšanas māksla kopš Aristoteļa laikiem, īpaši pēdējā gadsimta laikā, izpelnījusies kritiskās diskursa analīzes pētnieku uzmanību. Retoriskie jautājumi kā viens no politiskajā diskursā lietotajiem retorisko līdzekļu veidiem tiek škietami par zemu novērtēti, it sevišķi situācijās, kad runas mērķis nav skaidri redzama argumentācija, pārliecināšana vai manipulācija. Attiecīgi retorisko jautājumu slēptā doma enkurojas dziļāk diskursa uztveres procesā un tādējādi atmiņā tiek uzglabāta ilgāk. Pētījumā analizētas 175 Baltijas valstu prezidentu runas, kas sniegtas dažādos nacionāli svarīgos brīžos kopš Latvijas valsts neatkarības pasludināšanas vai neatkarības atjaunošanas Lietuv…

Territorialization in Political Discourse: A Pragma-Linguistic Study of Jerzy Buzek’s Inaugural Speeches

2011

The purpose of this study is to review some discursive strategies used to (de)territorialize the European public sphere by the newly elected President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek. A corpus of his inaugural speeches (over 7,000 words) is examined in order to identify salient pragma-linguistic devices, such as for example high-frequency references, linguistic markers of identities, values and interests, as well as metaphors and argumentative schemata. These are presumed to have been used by Buzek to territorialize the presidential office: to position himself as its leader, to establish his credibility, to become its agenda-setter. Additionally, the analysis focuses on the way Buzek…

Federalism, Proportionality, and Popular Will in US Presidential Elections: Did Colorado Have the Right Idea?

2015

As is well known, the United States is a federal country composed of 50 states plus the District of Columbia, where the individual states and the country as a whole are each sovereign jurisdictions. This is reflected everywhere in its political-administrative structure, including the election of the US President, who is elected by the Electoral College and not directly by the people; an issue that provokes a confrontation between abolishers of the Electoral College and supporters of the current system each time a candidate not winning the most popular votes is elected President (last time in 2000 elections). Between both extremes, there are intermediate solutions that, while continuing to r…

Leader of my Heart!

2015

The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of ‘new’ media technologies which have contributed to reshaping the relationships between politicians, journalists and the general public in Western democracies and around the world (Fox and Ramos, 2012; Lilleker and Jackson, 2013). After diverse early attempts in several countries to harness these new tools during election periods, their use by Barack Obama’s campaign team in the 2008 US presidential elections is often cited as one of the first examples in which they appeared to contribute positively to mobilising sympathisers and party activists around the campaign (Thimm, 2011). In the subsequent 2010 UK general ele…

2020

In this article, we examine the discursive practices of (de)stigmatizing right-wing populist party leaders. We draw on a recent example from Finland by examining how the female presidential candidate of a right-wing populist party was portrayed in the Finnish media during the 2018 presidential campaign season. We examine the stigmatization by the press media and the stigma-management tactics used by the presidential candidate to resist stigmatization. The media representation of the right-wing party leader is highly tensioned, and the media positions her political leadership within the duality of charisma and stigma. In our analysis, we extend earlier literature by unveiling the emotional t…

It’s a matter of confidence. Institutions, government stability and economic outcomes

2021

In this paper we analyse the effect of constitutional structures over policy outcomes. In particular, we exploit the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems deriving from the presence and the use of the confidence vote to investigate whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policies they implement. This finer partition of parliamentary systems allows us to identify effects that are more robust than the ones previously discussed in the literature. We show that the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems documented in previous works is driven by a difference between presidential and stable parliamentary systems. We suggest that poss…

The Present Through the Past: Polish Presidents and the Post-Communist Debate, 1989–2010

2013

I argue that the category of post-communism, though fuzzy in meaning and theoretically unrefined, did mark an essential point of dispute (albeit symbolic) in the democratization period of the Polish political system between 1989–2010. The dispute over post-communism in Poland was initially conditioned mainly by ideological divisions (first half of the 1990s) and later by a ‘competition of power’ (especially from 2000). The specific role played by the presidents in the debate over the communist past and post-communist reality of Poland resulted from his insufficiently defined position in the political system, as well as from the fact that up to 2010 the presidency was held by key actors on t…

Presidential speeches and the online politics of belonging : Affective-discursive positions toward refugees in Finland and Estonia

2019

The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has added urgency to the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in European societies. This study explores how emotions figure in this politics of belonging by studying their discursive mobilization in Finnish and Estonian public debates on asylum seekers. Focusing on presidential speeches addressing the refugee issue, on the one hand, and their reception by online commenters on popular tabloid news sites, on the other, the comparative analysis highlights both similarities and differences in how emotional expressions are employed in these two countries with very different experiences of taking refugees. Despite employing common discursive elements in thei…

On Introducing Proportionality in American Presidential Elections: An Historical Analysis, 1828-2008

2011

It is well known that the President of the United States is elected by the Electoral College and not directly by the population. Every time a candidate who does not win the most popular votes is elected President, detractors of the Electoral College call for its abolishment and supporters extol its undoubtedly merits. This article investigates what would have happened if a solution halfway between both extremes (a direct national election and the current system) had been used in historical Presidential elections; namely, a proportional rule with thresholds to assign electors in each state. This system would generate electoral colleges closer to popular will, reduce the risk of electing a mi…