Constitutional Democracy

Abstract

The conjunction of constitutionalism and democracy is relatively recent. It arose in European thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, appearing in different forms in the wake of the revolutionary moments in England post-1640 and again in 1688, the USA following independence and the drafting of the constitution in 1787 and in France after 1789. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially after World War II, a democratic regime gradually came to be regarded as needing to be by definition a constitutional regime as well. Yet, democracy may be deemed constitutional in a variety of ways and contemporary constitutional democracies differ greatly in a number of respects. The USA, Germany, Italy, Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and Finland may all be constitutional democracies but their political and legal institutions, norms, and practices diverge in ways that reflect very different conceptions of constitutionalism, on the one hand, and democracy, on the other, and of the relationship between these two concepts.