This article analyses the mechanisms establishing time consistency of constitutions. It explains why shorter and more locked constitutions are more likely to be time consistent (change less) and that long constitutions are more time inconsistent (change more, despite locking). Empirical evidence from all of the democratic countries in the world indicates that the length and locking of constitutions are not independent criteria, and that their combination leads to less time consistency. To address this inter‐relationship, a measure of time inconsistency (a combination of locking and amendment rate) is developed and it is demonstrated that it is connected with the length of constitutions. The article shows how time inconsistency is incompatible with theories of ‘constitutional amendment culture’ not only at the theoretical level, but also empirically. Finally, the article proves that the empirical finding that the length of constitutions is related to lower per capita income and higher corruption are not only in agreement with time inconsistency arguments, but this also extends beyond OECD countries to all democracies.

In a rising number of countries, populist parties participate in coalition governments. While there exists a consensus that populism is incompatible with core tenets of liberal democracy on a conceptual level, we know much less about whether or not the participation of populist parties in government constitutes a threat to liberal democracy in practice. We study the impact of populist parties in coalition governments using a novel dataset of more than 2000 laws that were under review at the Austrian Constitutional Court between 1980 and 2021. We provide evidence that the court did not find laws passed by governments that included a populist party unconstitutional more often than those passed by non‐populist governments. Our findings indicate that the Austrian Freedom Party did moderate its policy while in office. The results imply that it is necessary to distinguish policy positions in party manifestos and party rhetoric from policies actually implemented by governments.

Understanding of the relationship between constitutionalism and democracy among legal and political philosophers reflects an idealised account of the US constitution and the nature of judicial review. This view is normatively and empirically flawed. The US constitution is built on pre-democratic assumptions and its counter-majoritarian checks and balances are largely regressive, benefitting privileged minorities over the underprivileged. By contrast, ‘actually existing democracy’, involving competing parties and majority rule, is constitutional in its process and effects, treating all with equal concern and respect, upholding rights and maintaining the rule of law. Judicial review undermines these beneficial qualities.

The Academic Freedom in Constitutions dataset is a new resource that empirically maps constitutional guarantees of the freedom of science, of academic freedom, and of university autonomy in 203 countries, spanning the period from 1789 to 2022. While the topic of academic freedom has been gaining increasing prominence in political and legal research over the past decade, it is so far largely absent from the comparative constitutional literature. However, its global codification process holds interesting insights for the study of international norm diffusion, both with respect to its functional connection to higher education development and its distinct constitutional genealogies. The paper first introduces the dataset and explains how it is different from previous coding efforts, before discussing its significance and potential contributions to the comparative legal literature, political science, and other research.

This article reviews Giovanni Sartori's contribution to contemporary political science. Sartori, who has just turned eighty, re-founded Italian political science and taught a generation of political scientists. He has made important contributions on democracy, party systems, and on political and constitutional engineering, and has written many significant methodological articles. Conceptual clarity, analytical rigour, methodological awareness, and interest in theory-building have allowed Sartori to become one of the most prominent political scientists of the 20th century.

A growing number of researchers study the laws that regulate the third sector and caution the legal expansion is a global crackdown on civil society. This article asks two questions of a thoroughly researched form of legal repression: restrictions on foreign aid to CSOs. First, do institutional differences affect the adoption of these laws? Second, do laws that appear different in content also have different causes? A two-stage analysis addresses these questions using data from 138 countries from 1993 to 2012. The first analysis studies the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and constitution-level differences regarding international treaties’ status. The study then uses competing risk models to assess whether the factors that predict adoption vary across law types. The study finds that given ICCPR ratification, constitutions that privilege treaties above ordinary legislation create an institutional context that makes adoption less likely. Competing risk models suggest different laws have different risk factors, which implies these laws are more conceptually distinct than equivalent. Incorporating these findings in future work will strengthen the theory, methods, and concepts used to understand the legal approaches that regulate civil society.

This article addresses questions about the identity of the subject of constitutional law from a historical-sociological perspective. It aims to reconstruct, beneath the surface of constitutional texts, the actual material subjects that commonly give rise to constitutions. To do this, it isolates the constituent conjunctures in which constitutions have typically been written, and it describes the social pressures that obliged members of different societies to articulate their subjectivities in constitutional fashion. It uses this reconstruction to suggest a new framework for approaching questions of constitutional subjectivity and legitimacy, as, contrary to more deliberative methods, it explains how experiences of military violence usually shaped the emergence of constitutional subjects. On this basis, it argues that constitutions typically acquired stable legitimating force, not by enacting the will of identifiable constitutional subjects, but by displacing such subjects into a manageable form, separate from their military emphases. It cautions against idealist theories of constitutional subjectivity, arguing that most constitutions create legitimacy for government specifically as they promote societal integration in procedures that are not defined by the subjects to which they attribute their authorship. It concludes by addressing some current examples of constitutional crisis, considering how these have been shaping by literalist understandings of constitutional subjectivity.

In the same vein as John Hart Ely, but with a modern, global focus, a new wave of comparative constitutional scholarship focuses on the role of courts in protecting and promoting democracy. This article introduces this new wave of ‘comparative political process’ theory (CPPT), and explains its origins and utility, but also suggests it is best conceptualized as a form of ‘comparative representation-reinforcing’ theory (CRRT). Labels are not everything, but they do matter. And CRRT better captures the varieties of different forms of judicial democracy protection and promotion, and avoids any false claim of neutrality for such an approach.

European constitutions differ greatly in the depth to which they deal with emergencies: while many constitutions devote more or less detailed regulation to emergency regimes, others almost completely neglect these issues or dedicate only some very short and vague references to emergency situations and powers. This article aims to carry out a systematic comparison of the emergency-related provisions of forty European constitutions, focusing on (1) the level of detail of the regulation, (2) the emergency regimes addressed, and (3) the restrictions on fundamental rights. As the study points out, only two out of the forty constitutions are completely silent on emergency powers. However, the remaining thirty-eight constitutions show wide variation in the level of detail of the emergency regulation; the vast majority of the emergency regimes are related to war or armed attack (or the danger thereof), to internal crises threatening the constitutional order, and to natural disasters. Concerning fundamental rights, the examination of the constitutional texts confirms that twenty-five out of the forty constitutions encompass some provisions on the restriction of these rights in a state of emergency.

It has been over 40 years since the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) was concluded and opened for signature, and 30 years since its entry into force. This has sparked renewed attention to the question of how the LOSC can continue to regulate new uses of, and threats to, our oceans. Some have sought to answer this question by framing the LOSC as a ‘constitution’ for the oceans, as a reassertion of its continued influence. This article shows that this provides a false sense of security. While the LOSC is one of the most impressive and significant treaties, it should not be regarded as a constitution. This article examines how the LOSC can remain an effective and enduring framework for the law of the sea, arguing that regarding it as a constitution does not necessarily contribute to that goal. Instead, it proposes a new approach to the treatment of the LOSC which attempts to explain how best it can serve as a ‘living treaty’ and as a framework that is truly capable of guiding legal responses to new opportunities and challenges at sea.