In both Poland and Hungary new constitutions were adopted after elections that provided a new government with the formal capacity to control the process by excluding opposition interests. However, whereas in Poland the constitution was in the end the result of a compromise among a plurality of political interests, in Hungary the government unilaterally imposed the constitution with negative consequences for the future of democracy in the country. In this chapter, we argue that a more consensual constitution-making process was possible in Poland because opposition forces, in spite of their meager results in terms of parliamentary representation, were able to exert influence over the process through extra-institutional and institutional means. In contrast to Hungary, where opposition groups were extremely weak or discredited, in Poland extra-parliamentary opposition maintained significant support among voters and functioned as an effective political constraint on dominant parties. Thanks to their strength outside formal political institutions, opposition forces in Poland were able to induce incumbents to make changes in the constitution-making procedures that allowed them to have some clout in the drafting of the constitution.

Although many contemporary democracies face popular pressures to profoundly transform or replace their constitutions, there is little systematic academic discussion on the legal and political challenges that these events pose to democratic principles and practices. This book is a collaborative effort by legal scholars and political scientists to analyze these challenges from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. This introductory chapter discusses the phenomenon of constitutional redrafting in democratic regimes around the world and the contributions each chapter in the book makes to an understanding of the factors leading to the adoption of new constitutions in the context of free and fair elections, the procedural and political features of these episodes, and the relationship between constitutional replacements in democratic regimes, democratic theory, and democratization.

This chapter discusses the impact of direct citizen participation and elite cooperation in constitution making on the deepening of an already existing electoral democracy. It argues that cooperation among a plurality of elected political representatives at the constitution-making stage is likely to improve the liberal dimension of democracy after the enactment of the new constitution. Inclusive constitutional agreements at the elite level and the dispersion of power that makes them possible not only facilitate the creation of legal limits on state action but also provide opposition parties and citizens alike with the means to make institutional constraints on executive power and civil liberties effective. This effect is usually observed during the early years of life of the new constitution, when the balance of power among the political forces that created the constitution tends to remain stable. The chapter shows preliminary support for this argument analyzing aggregate data and selected case studies from all episodes of democratic constitution making in the world between 1900 and 2015.

By the end of the nineteenth century the vast majority of Latin American constitutions had presidents with a relatively high degree of autonomy from congress in the operation of government, reactive legislative power, and little or no power to promote legislative change. This design has changed radically; gradually in the early decades of the twentieth century, and more rapidly after the expansion of electoral democracy in the region since the late 1970s. One salient feature of this transformation is that whereas the government powers of presidents have generally decreased, their powers in the legislative arena, in particular to promote legislative change, have increased.