Constitutional Rigidity Matters: A Veto Players Approach

Abstract

Constitutional amendment rules have traditionally been considered the most important part of a constitution. Nevertheless, recent empirical analyses argue that constitutional amendment rules do not matter at all. This dispute is due to the misuse of independent and dependent variables and inappropriate methodology. Using the Veto Players approach to measure constitutional rigidity, this article proposes a new index covering ninety-four democratic countries. It starts by explaining the underlying logic of the veto players approach and describing the specific derivation of the rules for the construction of the rigidity index, which aggregates all institutional provisions in a logically consistent way. It then explains why the lack of constitutional rigidity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for significant constitutional amendments in democratic countries. Finally, the author creates a new dataset on the significance of constitutional amendments and estimates the appropriate (heteroskedastic) model, which corroborates the theoretical expectations and demonstrates that more significant amendments lead to a better fit.

Negative Shocks and Political Parties’ Territorial Demands: The Institutional Roots of Party Competition

“…Another way of examining the relationship between the three factors is looking at Figure 3. Based once again on the results presented in Table 1, this figure now plots the marginal effect of economic shocks on parties' position on the territorial dimension conditional on Tsebelis's index of constitutional rigidity (Tsebelis, 2021) and under two scenarios: with a federal contract (federalism index takes value 3.5) and without a federal contract (federalism index takes value 1). The results are similar than the ones presented before.…”

“…As it is known, the index correlates well with other measures of federalism used in the literature (Vatter, 2009). Second, constitutional rigidity is measured using the index of constitutional rigidity recently developed by (Tsebelis, 2021). The index departs from the idea that constitutions are an institutional outcome that originate from the interaction between institutions and different players with varying degrees of vetoing capacity.…”

“…Column 1) in Table 3 does not include Year FEs, but columns 2) and 3) include Year FEs. Importantly, the measure of constitutional rigidity is the same as before (Tsebelis, 2021). All models in Table 3 include a control for parties' position on the left-right dimension.…”

“…Finally, we replicate our initial baseline models but this time employing an alternative measure of constitutional rigidity. Instead of using the recently developed measure of constitutional rigidity by Tsebelis (2021) that uses a veto-player approach, here we employ the classical country-level measure of constitutional rigidity by Lijphart (1999). The latter considers rigidity in a different fashion, namely focusing on the qualified majorities required for amendment process.…”

La rigidez constitucional ante la enmienda en Ecuador

“…Asimismo, puede estar prohibido modificar determinados artículos como los derechos humanos o el tipo de régimen. Finalmente, existe una amplia gama de procedimientos de revisión aplicables que van desde múltiples órganos, referendos, a retrasos que a veces involucran elecciones intermedias, e incluso crean órganos especiales como asambleas constitucionales (Tsebelis, 2020). Un país con flexibilidad constitucional no necesita modificar su constitución con frecuencia.…”