Institutional interests and the politics of constitutional amendment
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| Author | Anna Fruhstorfer,Michael Hein |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512119871323 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512119871323
International Political Science Review
2021, Vol. 42(2) 229 –244
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512119871323
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Institutional interests and the
politics of constitutional
amendment
Anna Fruhstorfer
University of Göttingen and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Michael Hein
Adult Education Center Altenburger Land, Germany
Abstract
Institutional interests are often the main determinant of day-to-day politics. However, do they also matter in
the more consensus-oriented field of constitutional politics? To answer this question, this article examines
the success and failure of constitutional amendment drafts. We reassess a hypothesis proposed by Donald S.
Lutz more than 20 years ago, according to which the initiator of an amendment is a significant determinant of
its success, that is, of its passing or not passing. This study is based on a unique dataset of successful and failed
constitutional amendments, covering 18 post-socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (1990–2014).
We demonstrate that the chances of success for a given constitutional amendment are clearly driven by
institutional interests: cabinet and presidential proposals have significantly higher chances of success than
parliamentary and public initiatives. Additionally, success or failure also depend on the level of democracy
and the rigidity of the amendment process.
Keywords
Constitutions, constitutional amendment, constitutional politics, institutional interests, Central and Eastern
Europe
Introduction
All over the world, from Hungary to Egypt, in Mexico or Botswana amending constitutions is a
key tool in the transition from autocracy to democracy; unfortunately, also from democracy back
to autocracy. In this time of an astounding decline in democratic regimes that amounts to a new
Corresponding author:
Anna Fruhstorfer, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institute of Social Sciences, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin,
Germany.
Email: anna.fruhstorfer@uni-goettingen.de
871323IPS0010.1177/0192512119871323International Political Science ReviewFruhstorfer and Hein
research-article2019
Article
230 International Political Science Review 42(2)
wave of autocratization, understanding the way in which constitutions are amended and what
makes amendment drafts more, or less, likely to be adopted, is particularly salient.
Obviously, not every amendment draft is approved or implemented. In fact, the rate of success-
ful constitutional amendments, that is, amendment proposals that have been passed and have come
into effect, varies dramatically from one country to another, and often in ways that are not notice-
able on first glance. For instance, the number of amendments adopted in the Czech Republic and
Croatia are quite similar (Fruhstorfer and Moormann-Kimáková, 2016; Seha 2016). Since the first
post-socialist constitutions of the two countries came into force, eight amendments have been
adopted in the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2014, while six were adopted in Croatia from 1990 to
2014. This could lead one to assume that both countries share a similar level of constitutional activ-
ity but in fact, there were 84 attempts to amend the Czech constitution over the above-mentioned
period, while there were only eight amendment initiatives in Croatia. This results in dramatically
different success rates for the two countries, of 0.10 and 0.75, respectively, which mirrors the vari-
ation in the constitutional life of states in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But what affects
the likelihood that a constitutional amendment will be adopted?
In this study, we argue that political actors have to reconcile two realities while pursuing the
amendment of constitutions. On the one hand, they are actors with partisan affiliations, who
emphasize their own profile. However, they also function within an institutional logic and expecta-
tions of the interests of this specific institution. From a constructivist perspective, these interests
vary due to the intrinsic characteristics of the respective institutions, that is, their functions and the
way they come into power (Sánchez-Cuenca, 2003: 88). The relationship between these institu-
tional preferences and political outcomes are not unidirectional (as a rational choice argument
would suggest). Rather, they interact with the context, thus affecting each other.
This relationship makes it difficult to distinguish between institutional interests and how they
translate into institutional behavior and thus political outcomes. This link is neither always strong
nor unambiguous. Its strength depends largely on the policy field, the majority constellations, and
the timing. Institutional interests ‘constrain and refract politics but they are never the sole "cause"
of outcomes’ (Thelen and Steinmo, 1992: 3). This makes it difficult to convincingly relate institu-
tional interests with a political outcome compared to other possible causal factors. But, when a
political outcome requires consensus-oriented inter-partisan cooperation beyond the basic majority
requirement for normal legislation, we expect institutional interests to become more visible.
This argument engages with an important discussion in research on institutional change. Within
the dominant neo-institutionalist framework, constitutions are too often conceptualized as exoge-
nous. Yet, constitutionalism research has provided ample evidence that constitutions are, as other
institutions, also endogenous (Pérez-Liñán and Castagnola, 2016). In line with this research, we
argue that constitutional change has both endogenous and exogenous causes. We test for both of
these and demonstrate that the endogenous, that is, institutional interests, of the initiators are the
main explanation for the success or failure of a modification of the (constitutional) rules under
which they act.
The field of constitutional politics requires partisan cooperation, since enacting a new constitu-
tion or amending it regularly entails qualified parliamentary majorities. Hence, constitutional poli-
tics provides an ideal field to link institutional characteristics and institutional interests with
political outcomes.
Previous research on constitutional politics has furthermore focused almost exclusively on
approved amendments. However, this success-oriented perspective significantly narrows our
understanding of constitutional politics. Expanding our view to the largely unexplored realm of
failed amendments may provide not only insights into the role of institutional interests but also the
key to a more comprehensive understanding of constitutional change. It is difficult to fully grasp
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