Dr Radek Zubek awarded funding for Parliaments and majority rule in East Central Europe project

A British Academy small research grant has been awarded toDr Radek Zubek for his project Parliaments and majority rule in East Central Europe. The award will run from 1 September 2011 to 31 December 2012.

Dr Zubeks project examines the patterns of majority rule in post-communist legislatures in East Central Europe, with a particular focus on the control of the plenary agenda. It addresses the question to what extent governments and/or majority parties are able to delay or block opposition initiatives from being debated on the floor of parliament. The project examines the second decade of post-communism (1998-2008) in three states: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. For all three countries, empirical data on the configuration of formal rules governing floor agenda setting will be collected based on constitutions and parliamentary standing orders. These findings will be contextualized by qualitative evidence on informal agenda-setting conventions obtained through personal, semi-structured interviews with parliamentary officials and MPs. Finally, quantitative data on the actual patterns of floor agenda setting will be collected from online parliamentary databases.