Parliaments in De Facto States – Merely a Rubberstamp or Engine of Conflict Resolution?

While parliaments are core institutions within democracies, they also fulfil central functions in maintaining the political system in hybrid regimes and autocracies. But how do they perform in state-like regimes with limited international recognition, so-called “de facto states”? So far, there have been no comparative approaches to investigate the role and functions that parliaments can assume in such contexts. Furthermore, individual studies are only available in a very limited form. This is even more surprising as many of these regimes can be located in Europe or on the European periphery, and thus repeatedly force EU foreign policy to walk a diplomatic tightrope, like in the case of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus or the Republic of Kosovo. What influence does the limited international recognition exert on the role of the parliaments? To what extent is the fulfilment of the parliaments’ functions more dependent on the level of democracy or dependent on what de facto states are hoping to achieve (independence, re-organisation or integration)? These and other questions will be addressed by conceptualising a research framework for parliaments in de facto states. In a second step, the activities and communication of the parliaments are examined and compared with the level of democracy and the declared aims of the state. Based on this, an initial typology of parliaments in de facto states will be developed by analysing the various case studies of a total of ten parliaments.