Amending the Slovak Parliamentary Rules of Procedure: Effective Changes or the Government's Weapon against the Opposition?

Parliament is considered one of the most important institutions in representative democracies. However, Rules of Procedure as institutional regulation of its activity have been rarely analysed. This paper aims to fill this gap by conducting an analysis of amending the Rules of Procedure of the Slovak legislature in the period 1998-2016, almost its entire existence. The analysis not only covers passed amendments but also looks at proposed but unpassed ones. The main assumption is that through changing the parliamentary rules, the parliament adapts itself to specific trends. These are identified in the paper, as well as the main categories the proposed amendments concentrated on, distinguishing between redistributive and effective amendments. One of the key findings of the paper is that it is not the government that dominates the process of proposing amendments to the parliamentary rules. On the other hand, when we look at passed amendments only, the government is, then, the dominant actor. The assumption that the amendments of the Rules of Procedure are primarily of a redistributive character was not verified. Despite the fact that amending these rules may be used by the governmental majority to redistribute the power in the Slovak parliament, in practise, such behaviour is rather infrequent and cannot be described as the government's weapon against the opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]