Hur kan konstitutionell rigiditet mätas?

Kirjoittajat

• Dag Anckar

Abstrakti

The concept of constitutional rigidity refers to the difficulty of the constitutional amendment process. One central dividing line in the constitutional politics literature is between flexible and rigid constitutions; however, as very few constitutions are flexible in a full sense of the word, the most interesting differences are rather between types and categories of rigidity. Given this point of departure, this article addresses the question how to approach rigidity levels and how to measure rigidity in terms of scores that may come to use in research that makes use of rigidity as an independent (why rigidity) or dependent (so what, if rigidity) variable. The study is divided into two parts. First, scores are assigned to combinations in the amendment process of legislative and popular sovereignty, the first concept denoting the impact of legislative and executive institutions and the second denoting the extent to which constitutions make use of the referendum device either as an optional alternative or as an absolute requirement. Second, refining the analysis of legislative sovereignty and introducing now notions of repetitions (same instance; several sittings) and veto-players (several instances), an extended set of scores is manufactured. The amendment stipulations in the constitutions of the world in 2010 form a basis for deriving materials and empirical illustrations and are frequently cited throughout the study.