IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/publus/v33y2003i1p45-57.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Homogeneity and Democracy in Austrian Federalism: The Constitutional Court's Ruling on Direct Democracy in Vorarlberg

Author

Listed:
  • Anna Gamper

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze how homogeneity between the federation and the constituent Lander is provided by the Austrian federal Constitution in general. Focus is then put on a recent judgment of the Austrian Constitutional Court, which has been one of the most outstanding cases of the Court's “homogeneity jurisdiction.” The Court held a provision of a Land constitution to be in breach of the federal Constitution and therefore repealed it. The reason given was that the provision, which had obliged the Land parliament to pass a law if this was demanded by a people's petition and supported by the Land people in a referendum, endangered the system of representative democracy as provided by the federal Constitution. This narrow understanding of democratic homogeneity and the negligence of the principle of federalism are critically viewed in the article. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Anna Gamper, 2003. "Homogeneity and Democracy in Austrian Federalism: The Constitutional Court's Ruling on Direct Democracy in Vorarlberg," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 33(1), pages 45-57, Winter.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:33:y:2003:i:1:p:45-57
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:33:y:2003:i:1:p:45-57. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/publius .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.