Deparliamentarisation and reparliamentarisation of governance in the 20th and 21st centuries

This thesis concerns itself with the changing role of parliaments in modern democratic systems, which is a barely-explored topic so far. The goal of this work is to describe the main mechanisms causing the weakening of parliamentary power and to assess whether or how parliaments resist such pressures and how they adapt to them. In the first part of the work, I address the theoretical concept of parliamentary power from the perspective of political scientists of recent centuries. The aim of this part is to describe what power parliaments actually have or can have, so that the rest of the thesis can then be devoted to the analysis of changes in this power. In the second part, I address the influence of international law. Its expansion itself may represent a certain form of deparliamentarisation, but most of this part is devoted to the European Union as by far the most important supranational organization in terms of influence on national parliaments of its member states. I describe both the development of parliamentary interactions with the EU and their current state. The third part analyzes the influence of the electorate itself on the power of parliaments through direct democracy. The influence of referendums may seem not to be particularly dangerous for parliaments, since citizens' initiative is...