The Slovenian Parliament (Slovene: Slovenski parlament) is the informal designation of the general representative body of the Slovenian nation and the legislative body of the Republic of Slovenia.
According to the Constitution of Slovenia, the general representative body of the Slovenian nation is the National Assembly. The general public in Slovenia often refer to the National Assembly alone as the Slovenian Parliament.[1] However, the National Council, the representative body of basic social groups, also performs a further, if minor, part of the legislative function.[2]
The opinions of experts and of the general Slovenian public on whether the Slovenian Parliament is bicameral or unicameral differ, although most consider it to be incompletely bicameral.[3][4] In 2008, the Constitutional Court of Slovenia recognized the Slovenian Parliament as incompletely bicameral.[5]
History
The first Slovenian legislature was the Landtag or Diet of the Duchy of Carniola, the most predominantly Slovene-populated (95% in 1910) region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Established as part of the reforms that attended the Dual Compromise of 1867, the devolved legislature sat until the end of the empire in 1918. It consisted of a single chamber of thirty-seven delegates, whose competencies extended solely to local matters.
The interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a centralist regime, with a national parliament but no regional assemblies. The legal continuity of the present Slovenian Parliament can therefore be traced to the Constituent Assembly of the People's Republic of Slovenia, a unicameral body with 120 delegates elected on 27 October 1946.
The Assembly had been convened to draft a constitution; having done so, it began functioning as a legislature, and was renamed to the People's Assembly of the People's Republic of Slovenia on 17 January 1947.
In 1953, the Assembly was made bicameral, encompassing two houses ("zbor", usually also translated as "assembly".) The generally-representative Assembly of the Republic was supplemented with an Assembly of Producers, intended for representatives of state-owned industries.
In 1963, a new constitution renamed the polity the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. The new Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia was made a rare quintocameral legislature, comprising an:
Assembly of the Republic
Economic Assembly
Educational and Cultural Assembly
Socio-Medical Assembly
Organisational and Political Assembly
This was found to be unwieldy, and a 1968 amendment combined the middle three zbors into a single Assembly of Labor Associations, and renamed the final one to the Socio-Political Assembly.
A more radical reform followed soon afterward, when the devolutionary 1974 Yugoslav Constitution abolished the Assembly of the Republic altogether. Its competencies were transferred to the Socio-Political Assembly - a relatively small body, with only 50 delegates. Unlike the Assembly of the Republic - de-facto dominated by the League of Communists of Slovenia (ZKS), but nominally a representative body - the Socio-Political Assembly was explicitly partisan, and no longer elected by universal suffrage. Its fifty seats were formally allocated (ten each) to the ZKS and four of its subsidiary organizations:
the League of Socialist Youth of Slovenia (ZSMS)
the Socialist League of the Working People of Slovenia (SZDLS)
the League of Trade Unions, and
the Association of Veterans of the Slovenian National Liberation War
Socio-Political Assembly delegates were elected indirectly, in Soviet-type single-candidate approval votes held by lower-level socio-political assemblies operating at the municipal level
The tricameral structure of the 1968 arrangement was retained; the Socio-Political Assembly was supplemented with a new Municipalities' Assembly (150 delegates) and an Assembly of United Labor (60-65 delegates). The latter zbor was a continuation of the 1968 Assembly of Labor Associations, and was (like it) geared toward the representation of economic and occupational interests (though it also contained representatives from state agencies, and a single delegate from the federal armed forces.)
Legislative reforms in 1990 saw the word "Socialist" dropped from the republic's name, and the League of Communists surrendering its privileged status. In the multi-party elections of the same year, the three zbors were retained, though their number of deputies was equalized at 80 each, for a total of 240. The Socio-Political Assembly was converted into a general representative body, while the other two zbors retained their specialized representation, but on a contested multi-party basis. The basic structure of the 1974 arrangement therefore endured until the first elections under the 1991 constitution could be held in December of 1992.
The new constitution abolished all three zbors, but the functions of the Municipalities' Assembly and Assembly of United Labor were retained and combined in the new 40-seat National Council, with 18 seats allotted to local interests and the remaining 22 to basic social groups such as employers, students, and workers. The Socio-Political Assembly was replaced by the National Assembly, a democratically-elected general representative body with ninety delegates.
↑"Državni svet: pogosto jabolko spora"[National Council: A Frequent Apple of Discord] (in Slovenian). MMC RTV Slovenija. 14 January 2009. Retrieved 16 December 2010.
↑Veljković, Božidar; Melita Stiplošek; Natalija Ulaga; Monika Koražija (2006). Državni svet - del slovenskega parlamenta?[National Council - a Part of Slovenian Parliament?](PDF) (in Slovenian and English). Retrieved 16 December 2010.
↑"U-I-295/07-8" (in Slovenian). Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia. 22 October 2008. Retrieved 16 December 2010. S tega vidika lahko govorimo o nepopolni dvodomnosti slovenskega parlamenta, kajti po ustavnopravni teoriji se šteje za dvodomno vsaka ureditev, v kateri delujeta na področju zakonodajne funkcije dva organa, ne glede na to, kakšno razmerje je med njima.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
