The proposed paper will analyze the evolution of formal and informal rights of minority parliamentary party groups and individual MPs in Slovak parliament. It will focus on all types of change concerning minority rights, which had been introduced in the amendments of Slovak constitution and parliamentary rules of procedure during five electoral terms (1994-2011). The analysis will focus on minority rights concerning legislation, voting, agenda setting, information access, control of the government and the distribution of personal and material resources.
In the first part the paper examines minority rights in Slovak parliament by temporal analysis and traces the formal development of minority rights and their application in the parliament. It will attempt to explain why changes occurred, the nature of these changes (partisan/ nonpartisan) and their impact on power relations among political actors. In the second part, the paper analyzes contextual dimension of minority rights by analyzing institutional choices regarding the office of the president, the electoral system, the Constitutional Court, party financing and EU matters.
