Based on the available experience and the alleged perspectives, the experts of the consortium will investigate the legal environment oflegislative and municipal elections in the shadow of the pandemic in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The country reports will shed light on the policy backgrounds and explain the detailed legal framework of elections in the respective countries. Specific focus will be given to identify what domestic interests and concerns are lying behind the constraints, restrictions and control mechanisms introduced and applied by the V4 countries, and what are the fundamental rights and other constitutional values behind these measures. The policy briefs will open the door to the comparative analysis, which will make attempts to show the similar policy considerations and common patterns of the reflections on the pandemic laws of the V4 countries in terms of the electoral rules. Moreover, the policy briefs will enable the consortium to assess the resilience of electoral procedural regimes of the region to unforeseen emergencies, and may ease to map out alternatives for amending the existing legal framework. The preparation of the country reports will be based partly in secondary legal research and it will earn also from primary research tools (interviews and consultations with the target groups, e.g. government officials, electoral offices, NGO-s). One of the most important objectives of the project is to develop policy recommendations concerning the electoral policies of the V4 countries. This ultimate goal will substantially add to the implementation of our comparative research findings and will reach directly the important target audiences of the project.
The policy briefs will also investigate the main features of post-covid electoral systems and will analyse in depth, which are those consequences of the pandemic, which will influence the electoral regimes on the long run. One policy brief will be drafted from each V4 country until 30 April 2022. These policy briefs will be discussed and disseminated via policy roundtables to be held in May-June 2022. A fifth policy brief (drafted until September 2022) will provide an overview of the most paramount electoral policy-related issues across the V4 region, in October 2022 just before the main project conference, a regional policy roundtable will take place to discuss and disseminate the ideas of this material.