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Comparative Constitutional Systems

Most countries of the world have written constitutions establishing basic rights and regulating the relationships between public offices, and between these public offices and the public. During the late middle ages and early modern times, constitutions were mainly devices for establishing local, sectorial, or individual rights and limiting powers. But as those old powers to be limited were autocratic, constitutionalism almost naturally advanced with the expansion of suffrage rights and democratization. Nondemocratic constitutions are still relatively abundant in some parts of the world. As of 2005, of the 126 independent countries with information on their constitutional laws collected, only 62 percent were considered “electoral democracies”—and only 46 percent were called “free” countries, according to separate data lists provided by Axel Tschentscher and Freedom House. But the number of constitutional democracies rose enormously during the last quarter of the twentieth century, encompassing for first time a majority of total world population by 1996. (Major exceptions are China, the Arab region, and the Middle East.) Thus, constitutionalism has been increasingly linked to democratization.

Mixed Constitutional Monarchy

A traditional constitutional model was a mixed monarchy, which united a one-person, nonelected monarch with executive powers and a multiple-person, elected assembly with legislative powers. This type of regime had already existed in certain medieval kingdoms in Europe in which an elected parliament limited the king’s power s. It also existed in the German Empire, where the emperor was elected by the representative Diet, and in the Christian Church, where the pope shared powers with councils. The modern constitutional formulas of a mixed regime were formally shaped in England following the revolution of 1688 and in France by the constitution of 1791. They were replicated during the nineteenth century in monarchies such as those of Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. In more recent times, similar formulas have been adopted in some Arab monarchies, such as Jordan and Morocco.

With broadening suffrage and democratization, the nonelected monarch’s powers were reduced, while those of the elected assembly expanded, especially regarding the control of executive ministers, thus moving towards a parliamentary regime. The powers of the one-person monarch were largely transferred to the prime minister elected by the parliament. In recent times, there are parliamentary regimes in about half of the democratic countries in the world. Some of these regimes are British-style monarchical variants, such as Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. Others are of the republican variant, such as Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, and Switzerland.

Constitution With Elected Chief Executive

In another democratic formula that originated with the 1787 constitution of the United States, it is not only the multiple person legislative assembly that is popularly elected but also the one-person chief executive. In the United States, the nonelected English monarch ceased to be recognized and was replaced with an elected president with executive powers. (At the time, the monarch of England was actually already highly dependent on parliament’s decisions.) This model of political regime implies separate elections for the chief executive and the legislative branch, divided powers, and checks and balances among the presidency, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. The basic formulas of the U.S. Constitution have been replicated in a number of Asian countries under American influence, including Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

A variant usually called presidentialism emerged in almost all twenty republics in Latin American since the midrate nineteenth century. Some founding constitution makers in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela claimed to be imitating the U.S. Constitution, but they were also influenced by the presidential Second Republic and the Second Empire in France. Some of them looked farther back to the absolutist monarchies that preceded mixed regimes and division of powers and aimed at having “elected kings with the name of presidents” (in Simón Bolívar’s words). Instead of checks and balances, most Latin American constitutions promoted or favored high concentration of power in the presidency. Similar features can be observed in a number of postcolonial republics in East and Southern Africa.

Dual-Executive Regimes

After World War I (1914–1918), Finland and Germany experimented with a different variant of political regime with separate elections and divided powers—usually called a semi presidential or dual-executive regime. This variant was more consistently shaped with the 1958 constitution of France. With this formula, the presidency and the assembly are elected separately, as in a checks-and-balances regime, but it is the assembly that appoints and can dismiss a prime minister, as in a parliamentary regime. The president and the prime minister share the executive powers in a governmental diarchy. Similar constitutional formulas have been more recently adopted in a few countries in Eastern Europe, including Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, as well as in a few countries in Africa.

Recent Trends

Recent trends favor democratic constitutional formulas permitting relatively high levels of social inclusiveness, political pluralism, policy stability, and democracy endurance. Actually, almost no new democracy established in the world during the broad “third wave” of democratization starting in 1974 has adopted the British-style constitutional model of parliamentary regime with majoritarian electoral rules and single-party cabinets. Of the democratic countries with more than one million inhabitants, fewer than one-sixth use parliamentary constitutional formulas with a majoritarian electoral formula, while more than one-third are parliamentary regimes with proportional representation electoral rules and multiparty coalition cabinets, and about one half are checks-and-balances regimes or its presidentialist and semi-presidential variants.

Bibliography:

Bogdanor, Vernon, ed. The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Colomer, Josep M. Political Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic is the American Constitution? New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Duverger, Maurice, ed. Les régimes semi-présidentiels. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986.
Freedom House. Freedom in the World 2005. Washington: Freedom House, 2005.
Grofman, Bernard, ed. The Federalist Papers and the New Institutionalism. New York: Agathon, 1989.
Lijphart, Arend, ed. Parliamentary versus Presidential Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Sartori, Giovanni. Comparative Constitutional Engineering. London: Macmillan, 1994.
Tschentscher, Axel. “International Constitutional Law.” University of Bern, 2005. www.oefre.unibe.ch/law/icl.