Constitution design is an academic field, a very niche area of political science, and nobody would ever implement anything like the US Constitution today. It would be like using ALGOL for a new project today instead of Python or Java.
The US Constitution was very much a version 1.0 project, written before people even knew political parties would be a design constraint. Constitutions are on like version 5 or 6 now. (I'm making up numbers but you get the idea.)
Most that seek to change the constitution want to take away rights or add new ones. It is good it is hard to change, especially when many of the change seekers can’t even get the popular support to get a law passed or a veto overridden.
I used to admire the US constitution. I've grown up now.
Who could possibly be opposed to human rights - i.e. human beings having rights? And indeed, the US constitution does appear to be largely about rights.
Over the years I've increasingly leaned to the view that these rights are mostly a legal fiction, and that the things that are supposedly rights are highly subjective political footballs. Nowadays I think of a constitution as a largely non-political set of rules for how government works; i.e. it's a description of a mechanism, not a description of an outcome.
From that point of view, the US Constitution is an awful constitution.
Ultimately all constitutions are just ink on paper (or parchment depending on age) and are only as good as the people who govern.
> things that are supposedly rights are highly subjective political footballs.
The fabric of society is a pitch where political football is played. The US Constitution is a product of the times when it was created, and so our pitch was created to balance the power of populous states vs. rural states with proportional representation (House) and fixed representation (Senate) and the electoral college. It took great pains to prevent rule by fiat of the executive because of the lesson from English rule. It's surprising it has held up, but a lot of the pressures that existed when it was created are still present (red state/blue state is really urban/rural) in the US today.
> From that point of view, the US Constitution is an awful constitution.
If a slow, plodding government that is largely effective only when faced with unifying crisis or there is a very high level of consensus is what you want, then the US Constitution works.
The US has thrived, meaning its definition of rights is reasonably on the mark.
What do you mean? US citizens have pretty much the most rights of any people in the world.
Can you list the countries that guarantee freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable searches and freedom to stay silent (not incriminate yourself)?
(Of course, the implementation of these rights is ... imperfect.)
It’s a delineation of governmental responsibilities between the various federal branches and the states. It wasn’t until the Bill of Rights was later ratified that it has anything to say about individual rights other than to deny them.
The (lack of a) Bill of Rights was a major concern when the Constitution was drafted. It was passed with the promise that amending it with a Bill of Rights would be the first priority.
The Constitution was only passed without it so the convention wouldn't keep dragging on.
The mistake here is thinking that "political science" is actually a science, and so being on "version 5 or 6" is actually some kind of objective marker of progress in knowledge. That's a dubious assertion at best.
The article argues that newer versions of constitutions are often overly lengthy due to attempting to include too many laws within the constitution, which can cause problems. The article argues: "Overly long constitutions often create conflicts between articles that can only be resolved with further tampering. And “if everything is highest law, then nothing is highest law anymore,” points out Dr Versteeg. Omnibus amendments require voters to balance the merits and drawbacks of many changes at once, making it harder to generate consensus."
In brief, the article's view is that the inclusion of too many laws in more recently-written constitutions leads to greater incentives for constitutional rewrites as times and political views change, which is why the article favours shorter constitutions that guarantee fundamental rights, and are thus difficult to rewrite.
[1] (Paywalled, though I've included a summary above): https://www.economist.com/international/2022/08/25/dictators...
While the latter has a vast test bed of real world utilization that reveals PL efficacy, the former can only be evaluated from the standpoint of theory, with a heavy heap of ideology.
I can agree with the broad point that inertia is a major cause for constitutions to stay the same over time. But I disagree with the original commenter's implication that more recently-written constitutions tend to be better than older ones due to lessons from the past, because of the idea (perhaps relating to yours) that contemporary political and ideological considerations can introduce weaknesses into more recently-written constitutions, which overlook potential lessons from the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_politics
Lest you think this is ideological or theoretical, no -- it's entirely about collecting data of real-world political operation, how similar or different constitutional structures result in similar or different outcomes given similar or different populations and histories.
It's incomparable to PLs, which have perhaps billions of case studies on which comparative analysis can be done.
Just because you wrote a good constitution doesn't make the government good. You can put anything you want into a constitution if you don't have the institutions set up right to maintain it.
Further, it's intentional that the federal government at times becomes unable to do it's job in times of intense disagreement. That was an intentional design feature.
I'll take a version 1.0 which is focused on reifying the natural God-given rights of man vs version 3.0 which reifies power of the State & Corporate "persons" over man.
The primitive low-level tech opens the space to what is possible. Improving low level components opens up a large space of possibility that is often inconceivable at the time the improvement is done. The reverse is disimproving low level components restricts the range of possibilities.
This is why we have seen so much churn in the front end & application libraries. More recent programming languages and front end & application libraries have sought to improve the low level apis to improve the development context of complex software.
A more evolved system (e.g. version 3.0) built with worse components is bound by the lack of quality of it's underlying components. So if version 3.0 Constitution is built with disimprovements in version 2.0 or earlier, it could be rendered worse than a version 1.0 built with quality components & quality first principles.
The modern approach is generally a parliamentary system rather than a presidential system, and multiparty proportional representation (sometimes with multi-member districts) rather than two-party first-past-the-post single member districts. Some places to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
If you want to look at more "advanced" constitional forms, then consociationalism is a good place to start, although much less widely adopted and more controversial as to whether it's progress or not:
I’m not a constitutional scholar but I take issue with that characterization.
Federalist #10 by James Madison is all about factions, how they are inevitable, and how the system of government should be structured so that their self interests balance out for the good of the nation. Madison wrote the Virginia Plan which proposed the three branches of government and he wrote down exactly what his thinking was at the time. For most of the 18th century the British empire was a single party state ruled by the Whigs which is what they were trying to avoid by explicitly allowing room for many factions.
From The Economist's article: "[...] But academics have noticed patterns. Frequently changed constitutions are often a symptom of political corrosion, and tinkering can cause chaos in turn. Attempts to amend charters have led to violence in Burkina Faso, Burundi and Togo among others in recent years. The world’s longest charters, such as India’s and Brazil’s, are also among the most changed.
"There is a strong case for brevity, too, in which constitutions establish the ground rules of how a state functions and leave the specifics to politicians. Overly long constitutions often create conflicts between articles that can only be resolved with further tampering. And “if everything is highest law, then nothing is highest law anymore,” points out Dr Versteeg. Omnibus amendments require voters to balance the merits and drawbacks of many changes at once, making it harder to generate consensus."
The viewpoint by the writer of The Economist's article would actually conflict with the view held by the original commenter, as it notes that many more recently-written constitutions that have taken different approaches from older constitutions have contributed to political instability (though the writer also acknowledges that other factors have also been at play behind instability).
[1] https://www.economist.com/international/2022/08/25/dictators...
THAT'S where the "V.1" honor comes from.
But neither are really great or terrible. Canada didn’t really change much, and South Africa hasn’t been doing great.
The “West German Basic Law” was widely condemned:
* it was unrealistic to have strong privacy protections for a nation filled with refugee camps and few private homes
* the protections for the family were meaningless when so few nuclear families survived (something like 70% of the country was female)
* the mandate to reunify was unrealistic and possibly undesirable
* there were no provisions for the victims of Nazi Germany
* it favored the establishment of strong, stable leaders - which brought back memories of Hitler
* many of the civil liberties - such as abolishing the death penalty - were just excuses to prevent punishment of war criminals (which was true)
* claiming the lands East of the Oder as part of Germany was unrealistic
Buy it turned out to be an extremely effective Constitution that lead to the transformation of Germany and its eventual reunification (mostly).
The amendment process is very onerous. 7/10 provinces haven't ever really agreed on the colour of the sky, let alone something as important as new constitutional rules. It took some very special backroom wrangling to pass it in the first place and I don't see a path to amending it during my lifetime. Meech Lake came close and very nearly broke the country.
The notwithstanding clause was necessary to get it passed at all, but really takes some of the teeth out of the charter of rights and freedoms. When parties hold majority control of the House of Commons or a provincial legislature a lot of what keeps their power in check is mostly norms it turns out. One of the few actual laws that would really impede them is the charter, but portions of it can be ignored.
Overall I'm very happy we have the 1982 Constitution Act, but I certainly wouldn't offer it up as a blueprint if someone came asking for assistance in drafting a constitution. The Charter itself as a portion of the larger constitution (minus the notwithstanding clause) is a very special piece of law that deserves some recognition internationally, but as a whole it wasn't even 10 years before the real issues were exposed with the whole document.
She suggested insurrectionists in Egypt emulate the South African and Canadian Constitutions, rather than the US Constitution.
She wasn’t insulting the US Constitution, just emphasizing it’s the product of circumstances that didn’t apply to Egypt.
Seems like the Canadian Constitution is similarly constructed - taking the specific time, place, customs into account.
Not a bad thing at all.
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/12/ruth-bader-ginsburg-taken-...
Even while many people in the US might like the things a parliamentary system has to offer, there is no viable way to transition to one culturally. As much Americans hate how politics works presently, they hate the idea of replacing it even more. The socio-cultural hesitancy is real, paradoxical, and cannot be ignored.
Hm... Germany's system changed at least 3 times in the 20th century. France is on its Fifth Republic. Italy is a shitshow.
To me it seems that the oldest democracies (UK, US) are the most stable (even today!) and they're majority systems (first-past-the-post).
..cites two of the most important examples
