Elections are indispensable components of a democratic order. They are a central and constitutive element of the democratic process. In modern representative democracies, the people, the sovereign power, decides on parties and persons as people's representatives and so also on political programs and goals.

In February 2006 a storm of outrage broke out in the world of Islam which expressed itself in protests and calls for boycotts, some of them violent. The bone of contention was a series of caricatures in the European media which had to do with the Prophet Mohammed some of which presented him pictorially. The reactions in the European public were split.

Constitutions regulate principle questions of national communities and their legal systems. They determine the rules of political processes. In the last years constitutional debates did not only take place on EU-level, but in Austria, too. By using the term "Convention" (EU-Convention and Austrian Convention) a concept of high symbolic impact was chosen.

Citizenship is among the topics that in recent years have come more and more into the public eye. In Europe, two phenomena in particular have colored debate on this topic and at the same time, have given it a new twist, namely, continuous migration and the political transformation of the European Union.