The Notion of a Community Organization in the Context of Election Code Provisions

The concept of “community organization” appears in the election code as one of the entities authorized to create election committees in local elections, although it has not been precisely defined. The aim of the article is to analyze this concept more closely and to determine the characteristics of a community organization based on the jurisprudence and doctrinal views in the field of constitutional law and other branches of law, particularly administrative law. As a result of the considerations carried out, significant features of the discussed organizations have been defined, including a regulated legal status, perdurance, conducting activities in the social interest, and a fundamental purpose other than conducting economic activities. It was also highlighted that some features previously indicated in the doctrine, such as the personal substrate or the association of individuals only, are of no significance.

Candidates of the Civic Platform of The Republic of Poland for mayors of cities in Western Pomerania. „Election locomotives” or beneficiaries of the party label?

The article concerns candidates for city mayors in the 2002-2018 elections in West Pomerania. It aims to analyse which of the contenders played the role of so-called locomotives in the city council elections and which owed their result to the banner of the committee/party from which they ran. The Civic Platform of the Republic of Poland was examined. It was examined whether the candidate for the president enjoyed greater support among voters, or whether candidates from the committee to the city council received more votes in total. How many won the presidential seat? Did presidential candidates also compete for a mandate on the city council and were they successful? What share did they have in the votes won by a given list? This made it possible to see whether the decisions of the Civic Platform’s leadership, in terms of choosing a presidential candidate, were beneficial to the party.

Why can’t it be done differently? Limited voter representation in provincial assemblies (sejmiki) in the period of 2014–2024

The problem of distorting the representativeness of elections to provincial assemblies in Poland is widely noted. The local government elections in 2024 confirm the indicated state of affairs. In many situations, the natural electoral threshold significantly exceeds the statutory threshold, and large groups of citizens do not have their representation in the sejmiks, while the largest groupings are overrepresented. The authors of this article set out to compare the number of voters without representation in provincial assemblies after the introduction of the Electoral Code, i.e. in the 2014, 2018 and 2024 local elections, despite having voted for groupings that exceeded the statutory electoral threshold. The authors, using institutional-legal analysis and classical systemic analysis, also propose a simple way to solve the pointed out significant problem for the representativeness of the elections, which is the abandonment of the division of provinces into smaller electoral districts.