We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2018
Constitutional referendum – Popular sovereignty – Constituent power – Democratic legitimacy – Participation in referendum as exercise of constituent power – The legal status conception of the constitution – The legal functions conception of the constitution – Open question whether every provision in codified constitutions is essential to constituent power – Therefore, constitutional referendum not always mandated by democratic legitimacy
Department of Political Science, Stockholm University.
1 Tierney, S., ‘Should the people decide: Referendums in post-sovereign age, the Scottish and Catalonian cases’, 45(2) Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy (2016) p. 99 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Contiades, X. and Fotiadou, A., Participatory Constitutional Change: The People as Amenders of the Constitution (Routledge 2017)Google Scholar. I follow the practice of speaking of referendums in the plural rather than the Latinised referenda.
2 The popularity of the constitutional referendum is well documented in Tierney, S., Constitutional Referendums: The Theory and Practice of Republican Deliberation (Oxford University Press 2012) p. 7 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Less than half of the constitutions of the countries in the world require referendum for amendment: Anckar, D., ‘Constitutional referendum in the countries of the world’, 7 Journal of Politics and Law (2014) p. 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Albert, R., ‘Four Unconstitutional Constitutions and their Democratic Foundations’, 50 Cornell International Law Journal (2017) p. 177 Google Scholar.
4 Morel, L., ‘Referendum’, in M. Rosenfeld and A. Sajó (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press 2012) p. 505 Google Scholar.
5 Hutchinson, A. and Colón-Riós, J., ‘Democracy and Constitutional Change’, 58 Theoria (2011) p. 48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Galligan, B., ‘Amending constitutions through the Referendum device’, in M. Mendelsohn et al. (eds.), Referendum Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan 2001)Google Scholar; Kalyvas, A., ‘Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power’, 12 Constellations (2005) p. 223 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schwartzberg, M., Democracy and Legal Change (Cambridge University Press 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Patberg, M., ‘Constituent power: A discourse-theoretical solution to the conflict between openness and containment’, 24 Constellations (2016) p. 51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chambers, S., ‘Democracy, popular sovereignty, and constitutional legitimacy’, 11 Constellations (2004) p. 153 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alexe, A-A., ‘Constituent Power – the Essence of Democracy’, 47 Revista de Ştiinţe Politice. Revue des Sciences Politiques (2015) p. 316Google Scholar.
6 de Raadt, J., ‘Contested Constitutions: Legitimacy of Constitution-making and Constitutional Conflict in Central Europe’, 23 East European Politics and Societies (2009) p. 315 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Chambers, S., ‘Constitutional Referendums and Democratic Deliberation’, in M. Mendelsohn and A. Parkin (eds.), Referendum Democracy: Citizens, Elites, and Deliberation in Referendum Campaigns (Palgrave 2001) p. 231 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Chambers, supra n. 5, p. 153.
9 Morris, C., ‘The very idea of popular sovereignty: We the people reconsidered’, 17 Social Philosophy and Policy (2000) p. 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Schwartzberg, supra n. 5, p. 6.
11 Kalyvas, supra n. 5, p. 238.
12 Galligan, supra n. 5, p. 110.
13 Loughlin, M., ‘On constituent power’, in M. Dowdle. and M. Wilkinson (eds.), Constitutionalism beyond Liberalism (Cambridge University Press 2017) p. 151 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Albert, R., ‘The State of the Art in Constitutional Amendment’, in R. Albert et al. (eds.), The Foundations and Traditions of Constitutional Amendment (Hart 2017)Google Scholar; T. Ginsburg and J. Melton, ‘Does the Constitutional Amendment Rule Mater at All? Amendment Cultures and the Challenges of Measuring Amendment Difficulty’, Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Working Paper No. 682 (2014); Schauer, F., ‘Amending the presuppositions of a Constitution’, in S. Levinson (ed.), Responding to Imperfection: the Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (Princeton University Press 1995)Google Scholar.
15 Loughlin, supra n. 13, p. 151. Various conceptions of constituent power are discussed in Loughlin, L., ‘The concept of constituent power’, 13 European Journal of Political Theory (2014) p. 218 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Colón-Ríos, J., ‘Five Conceptions of Constituent Power’, 130 Law Quarterly Review (2014) p. 306 Google Scholar; Tushnet, M., ‘Peasants with pitchforks, and toilers with Twitter: Constitutional revolutions and the constituent power’, 13 International Journal of Constitutional Law (2015) p. 639 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Albert, supra n. 3, p. 193.
17 Lindahl, H., ‘Constituent power and the Constitution’, in D. Dyzenhaus and M. Thorburn (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press 2016) p. 149 Google Scholar.
18 Pasquino, P., ‘The Un-Constituted power of the people: Article 138 of the Italian Constitution and Popular referendum’, Italian Law Journal (2017) p. 143 Google Scholar. See also Negri, A., Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (University of Minnesota Press 1999) p. 11 Google Scholar.
19 Aroney, N., ‘Constituent power and constituent states: towards a theory of amendment of federal constitutions’, 1 Jus Politicum Revue de Droit Politique (2017) p. 5 Google Scholar.
20 Vinx, L., ‘The incoherence of strong popular sovereignty’, 11 International Journal of Constitutional Law (2013) p. 101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Pasquino, P., ‘Constituent power and authorization’, in V. Ingimundarson, U. Philippe and I. Erlingsdottir (eds.), Iceland’s Financial Crisis: The Politics of Blame, Protest and Reconstruction (Routledge 2016)Google Scholar.
22 Roznai, Y., Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments: The Limits of Amendment Powers (Oxford University Press 2017) p. 161 Google Scholar and Colón-Riós, J., ‘The legitimacy of the juridical: Constituent power, democracy, and the limits of constitutional reform’, 48 Osgoode Hall Law Journal (2010) p. 227 Google Scholar n. 101. Cf Tushnet, supra n. 15, p. 653, defending a ‘purely conceptual’ account of constituent power that avoids referring to real people.
23 Kalyvas, supra n. 5, p. 238.
24 Hutchinson and Colón-Riós, supra n. 5, p. 48.
25 Jaume, L., ‘Constituent Power in France: The revolution and its consequences’, in M. Loughlin and N. Walker (eds.), The Paradox of Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press 2007)Google Scholar and S. Holmes and C. Sunstein, ‘The Politics of Constitutional Revision in Eastern Europe’, in Levinson, supra n. 14.
26 Corrias, L., ‘Populism in a Constitutional Key: Constituent Power, Popular Sovereignty and Constitutional Identity’, 12 EuConst (2016) p. 6 Google Scholar.
27 The distinction between the constitution as entrenched law and the constitution as fundamental law is discussed in Elster, J., ‘Forces and Mechanisms in the Constitution-Making Process’, 45 Duke Law Journal (1995) p. 366 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Albert, supra n. 3, p. 182.
29 Young, E., ‘The Constitution Outside the Constitution’, 117 Yale Law Journal (2007) p. 399 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Waldron, J., ‘Precommitment and disagreement’, in L. Alexander (ed.), Constitutionalism. Philosophical Foundations (Cambridge University Press 1998)Google Scholar.
31 C. Klein and A. Sajó, ’Constitution-making: process and substance’, in Rosenfeld and Sajó, supra n. 4, p. 418.
32 Weis, L., ‘Constitutional Amendment Rules and Interpretive Fidelity to Democracy’, 38 Melbourne University Law Review (2014) p. 242 Google Scholar.
33 The comparative constitutional law literature is more focused on what defines a ‘reasonable’ rate of amendment. The idea is that constitutional amendment should be neither too easy nor too hard, given the value of political stability. The rules of amendment represent the exhaust pipe that ‘helps maintain the delicate balance between democracy and limited government’. Katz, E., ‘On Amending Constitutions: The Legality and Legitimacy of Constitutional Entrenchment’, 29 Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems (1996) p. 254 Google Scholar and Lutz, D., ‘Toward a Theory of Constitutional Amendment’, 88 American Political Science Review (1995) p. 243 Google Scholar. But see Ginsburg and Melton, supra n. 14 arguing that the amendment culture is more important than the rules of amendment.
34 Hutchinson and Colón-Riós, supra n. 5, p. 48.
35 Lutz, supra n. 33, p. 259. See also Contiades and Fotiadou, supra n. 1, p. 25.
36 Hutchinson and Colón-Riós, supra n. 5, p. 49.
37 Suber, P., The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Logic, Law, Omnipotence, and Change (Peter Lang Publishing 1990)Google Scholar s 18B.
38 On the other hand, popular sovereignty is consistent with the entrenchment of the rules of amendment, provided that the rules so entrenched provide for popular participation in the amendment of the constitution. That is, a rule that denies the people the right to participate in revising the rules of amendment is consistent with popular sovereignty if the rules of amendment mandate constitutional referendum in the process of constitutional change. Cf Albert, R., ‘Amending constitutional amendment rules’, 13 International Journal of Constitutional Law (2015) p. 663 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 This is true even though it is often the case that other laws can also be entrenched in the informal sense of being perceived as virtually unamendable parts of the legal and political system. For example, though the United Kingdom does not have a written constitution in the sense of a document subject to formal entrenchment, it does have law that is considered entrenched and that would accordingly represent ‘the constitution’. See Gardner, J., ‘Can there be a written constitution’, in L. Green and B. Leiter (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law: Volume 1 (Oxford University Press 2011)Google Scholar.
40 Strauss, D., ‘The irrelevance of constitutional amendments’, 114 Harvard Law Review (2001) p. 1460 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis added.
41 T. Ginsburg, ‘Constitutional specificity, unwritten understandings and constitutional agreement’, Public Law & Legal Theory Working Papers (2010) No. 330.
42 Lutz, supra n. 33, p. 361.
43 Strauss, supra n. 40, p. 1487.
44 Loughlin, supra n. 15, p. 219.
45 Grimm, D., Constitutionalism. Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press 2016) p. 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. Gardbaum, ‘The Place of Constitutional Law in the Legal System’, in Rosenfeld and Sajó, supra n. 4, p. 172.
46 A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (Liberty Fund 2010 [1915]) p. 140. See also M. Tushnet, ‘Constitution’, in Rosenfeld and Sajó, supra n. 4, p. 218.
47 Gardner, supra n. 39.
48 Alexe, supra n. 5, p. 318.
49 Hart, H.L.A., The Concept of Law (Clarendon, 1961)Google Scholar and also G.J. Postema, A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, Volume 11: Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: The Common Law World (Springer 2011) p. 279.
50 Onuf, N., ‘The Constitution of International Society’, 5 European Journal of International Law (1994) p. 13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Not all secondary rules are constitutive of the legal system, as not all of them apply to public officials. For example, the rules of contract are secondary rules in the sense that they confer power on private individuals to make and change legally binding rules, yet they are not constitutive of the legal system as they do not apply (exclusively) to public officials. I am grateful to Lisa Hill for asking me to clarify this point.
51 The electorate approved same-sex marriage but rejected the proposal to lower the age of candidacy from 35 to 21 for the office of president. For an account of the exceptional background of the referendum, including a constitutional convention performing a deliberative experiment see J.A. Elkink et al., ‘Understanding the 2015 marriage referendum in Ireland: context, campaign, and conservative Ireland’, 32 Irish Political Studies (2017).
52 Art. 46 Constitution of Ireland.
53 Hart, H.L.A., ‘Bentham on Legal Powers’, 81 Yale Law Journal (1972) p. 807 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halpin, A., ‘The Concept of Legal Power’, 16 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (1996) p. 129 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54 Ch. 3 s. 4, Rättegångsbalken [Swedish Code of Judicial Procedure].
55 Gardner, supra n. 39. See also Davies, B., ‘Popular participation and legitimacy in constitutional change: Finding the sovereign’, 36 Liverpool Law Review (2015) p. 279 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Young, supra n. 29.
