Changes in the system of government and consolidation of democracy: a comparison of the role of president in Croatia and Slovakia
Keywords:
political system, Croatia, SlovakiaAbstract
In the 1990s, Croatia and Slovakia had statesmen with authoritarian tendencies. This was in many ways associated with the institution of the president and the 1999 and 2000 constitutional reforms, which were connected with this institution, established a parliamentary system with a directly elected president in those countries. This paper tries to determine if that affected the functioning of the system of government and the consolidation of democracy. Given that those changes were meant to prevent the emergence of new authoritarian statesmen, premise is that they should have had a positive impact on democratic consolidation. On the other hand, the introduction of a parliamentary system with a directly elected president created a risk that a constitutionally weak president, by calling on his great legitimacy acquired by direct vote, would strive to get powers that do not belong to him. The system would therefore receive the characteristics of a defective democracy and would not turn into a consolidated liberal democracy. By comparing constitutions and political practice we try to get an answer to this question.
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Copyright for papers published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal (this applies to both print and electronic issue). Papers in the journal are licensed under the Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY), which permits users to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, as well as to remix, transform and build upon material in educational and other settings, provided that the credit is given to the author and that the original work is properly cited. Complete legal background of license is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain permission to reproduce material from other sources. They also bear full responsibility in any cases of copyright infringement.