Comparative Constitutional Pol

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

How are constitutions crafted, changed, preserved, and ultimately made to matter in different polities? What goals – both general and specific – do leaders have when writing constitutions, and under what conditions are those goals likely to be achieved? Do constitutions serve purposes beyond those that leaders anticipate for them? Are entrenching constitutionalism, and constructing and maintaining meaningful democracy, synergistic or in tension? What difference does it make when rights of various types are included in a constitution? How do constitutional courts work and what difference do they make – and how does that vary across polities? This course explores these and other questions through a comparative examination of the theory and practice of constitutionalism. The first part of the course considers the “building blocks” for studying comparative constitutional politics. We review the basic issues and institutions involved in constitutionalism and the “new” constitutionalism and consider the relationships among them, and examine some of the key scholarly debates regarding the establishment of constitutions and constitutional courts, and what difference constitutionalism makes. We then analyze the origins and roles of constitutions, and the relevance of courts with constitutional review powers, in the United States, Germany, Brazil, Hungary, and South Africa; we also consider Egypt and Iraq in less depth. In each of these countries, constitutions were written and promulgated (or heavily revised) during a different sort of critical moment, and a central objective of the course is to understand what difference these distinct “founding conditions” make to constitutional politics.