Download or read book Comparing Constitutional Change in European Union Member States written by Christer Karlsson and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This article explores the under-researched issue of how constitutional change is brought about in modern democracies. Despite the fundamental importance of constitutions, we know surprisingly little about whether constitutional change is achieved by changing the explicit wording of the constitutional document, or by way of changing the meaning of the constitution while leaving the constitutional text unaltered. Which is the more common method and what variations in the use of these different methods are there in democratic political systems? This study systematically compares the use of explicit and implicit constitutional change in European Union (EU) Member States. The results show that implicit constitutional change is the more frequently used method, but also reveal substantial differences between EU countries. The article closes by discussing the road towards a theory of constitutional change. It does so by presenting five testable propositions that could lay the foundation for a theory of constitutional change.
Download or read book Engineering Constitutional Change written by Xenophōn I. Kontiadēs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive comparative guide to constitutional amendment in Europe and North America. The contributions to the book are written by experts in comparative constitutional law and looks at a particular country providing a critical analysis of its constitutional revision principles, procedure, practice and developments. The volume includes a final chapter with a comparative analysis on constitutional amendment elaborating on and attempting to develop an explanatory theory regarding the points of convergence as well as the detected differentiations. Thus allowing the comparative elements interesting at an international level to emerge and be assessed.
Download or read book Democratization and the European Union written by Leonardo Morlino and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-05-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines in depth the impact of the EU on aspects of the quality of democracy in eight selected post-communist countries. Considering both the political and legal aspects of the dynamics among institutions and focussing on inter-institutional accountability, the book analyses how constitutional designs have been effectively implemented to achieve this, and to what extent this was the result of EU action. In order to make a comparative assessment of the EU on democracies, the book features detailed case studies according to their different status vis-à-vis the EU, including older new member states: Poland and Hungary; newer new member states: Romania and Bulgaria; potential candidates: Albania and Serbia; and neighbour and remote neighbour states: Ukraine and Armenia. Each chapter addresses a range of dimensions and most relevant domains of inter-institutional accountability, that is: executive-legislative relationships; constitutional justice; decentralisation and regionalism; and the role of ombudsman or other relevant authorities. Seeking to assess how important the role of the EU has been in influencing the modes and characteristic of democracies and fundamental rights established in these regions, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, EU politics, Post-communist studies and democratization studies.
Download or read book Policy Making Processes and the European Constitution written by Thomas König and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume presents a wealth of fresh data documenting and analyzing the different positions taken by governments in the development of the European Constitution. It examines how such decisions have substantial effects on the sovereignty of nation states and on the lives of citizens, independent of the ratification of a constitution. Few efforts have been made to document constitution building in a systematic and comparative manner, including the different steps and stages of this process. This book examines European Constitution-building by tracing the two-level policy formation process from the draft proposal of the European Convention until the Intergovernmental Conference, which finally adopted the document on the Constitution in June 2004. Following a tight comparative framework, it sheds light on reactions to the proposed constitution in the domestic arena of all the actors involved. It includes a chapter on each of the original ten member states and the fifteen accession states, plus key chapters on the European Commission and European Parliament. This book will be of strong interest to scholars and researchers of European Union politics, comparative politics, and policy-making.
Download or read book Constitutional Politics in Central and Eastern Europe written by Anna Fruhstorfer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-12 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions to this edited volume discuss constitutional politics in 20 Central and Eastern European countries. The country chapters describe all constitutional amendments and new constitutions after the first post-communist constitution-making, all failed amendment attempts, and the political discourses about constitutional politics. Framed by a broad comparative chapter, the country studies are embedded in the established literature on constitutional politics. The book thus provides a better understanding of constitutional politics in the region and beyond.
Download or read book Participatory Constitutional Change written by Xenophon Contiades and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the recent trend of enhancing the role of the people in constitutional change. It traces the reasons underlying this tendency, the new ways in which it takes form, the possibilities of success and failure of such ventures as well as the risks and benefits it carries. To do so, it examines the theoretical aspects of public participation in constitutional decision-making, offers an analysis of the benefits gained and the problems encountered in countries with long-standing experience in the practice of constitutional referendums, discusses the recent innovative constitution-making processes employed in Iceland and Ireland in the post financial crisis context and probes the use of public participation in the EU context. New modes of deliberation are juxtaposed to traditional direct-democratic processes, while the reasons behind this re-emergence of public involvement narratives are discussed from the aspect of comparative constitutional design. The synthetic chapter offers an overview of the emerging normative and comparative issues and provides a holistic approach of the role of the people in constitutional change in an attempt to answer when, where and how this role may be successfully enhanced. The work consists of material specifically written for this volume, and authored by prominent constitutional scholars and experts in public participation and deliberative processes.
Download or read book How Constitutions Change written by Dawn Oliver and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set of essays explores how constitutions change and are changed in a number of countries, and how the 'constitution' of the EU changes and is changed. For a range of reasons, including internal and external pressures, the constitutional arrangements in many countries are changing. Constitutional change may be formal, involving amendments to the texts of Constitutions or the passage of legislation of a clearly constitutional kind, or informal and organic, as where court decisions affect the operation of the system of government, or where new administrative and other arrangements (eg agencification) affect or articulate or alter the operation of the constitution of the country, without the need to resort to formal change. The countries in this study include, from the EU, a common law country, a Nordic one, a former communist state, several civil law systems, parliamentary systems and a hybrid one (France). Chapters on non EU countries include two on developing countries (India and South Africa), two on common law countries without entrenched written constitutions (Israel and New Zealand), a presidential system (the USA) and three federal ones (Switzerland, the USA and Canada). In the last two chapters the editors conduct a detailed comparative analysis of the jurisdiction-based chapters and explore the question whether any overarching theory or theories about constitutional change in liberal democracies emerge from the study.
Download or read book Constitutional Change through Euro Crisis Law written by Thomas Beukers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multilevel and comparative constitutional analysis of the impact of Euro-crisis law on the EU Constitution and its Member States.
Download or read book Constitutional Review in Europe written by Maartje De Visser and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-07-18 with total page 1118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constitutions serve to delineate state powers and enshrine basic rights. Such matters are hardly uncontroversial, but perhaps even more controversial are the questions of who (should) uphold(s) the Constitution and how constitutional review is organised. These two questions are the subject of this book by Maartje de Visser, which offers a comprehensive, comparative analysis of how 11 representative European countries answer these questions, as well as a critical appraisal of the EU legal order in light of these national experiences. Where possible, the book endeavours to identify Europe's common and diverse constitutional traditions of constitutional review. The raison d'être, jurisdiction and composition of constitutional courts are explored and so too are core features of the constitutional adjudicatory process. Yet, this book also deliberately draws attention to the role of non-judicial actors in upholding the Constitution, as well as the complex interplay amongst constitutional courts and other actors at the national and European level. The Member States featured are: Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, and the United Kingdom. This book is intended for practitioners, academics and students with an interest in (European) constitutional law.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Change written by Xenophon Contiades and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative constitutional change has recently emerged as a distinct field in the study of constitutional law. It is the study of the way constitutions change through formal and informal mechanisms, including amendment, replacement, total and partial revision, adaptation, interpretation, disuse and revolution. The shift of focus from constitution-making to constitutional change makes sense, since amendment power is the means used to refurbish constitutions in established democracies, enhance their adaptation capacity and boost their efficacy. Adversely, constitutional change is also the basic apparatus used to orchestrate constitutional backslide as the erosion of liberal democracies and democratic regression is increasingly affected through legal channels of constitutional change. Routledge Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Change provides a comprehensive reference tool for all those working in the field and a thorough landscape of all theoretical and practical aspects of the topic. Coherence from this aspect does not suggest a common view, as the chapters address different topics, but reinforces the establishment of comparative constitutional change as a distinct field. The book brings together the most respected scholars working in the field, and presents a genuine contribution to comparative constitutional studies, comparative public law, political science and constitutional history.
Download or read book EU Law and National Constitutions written by Alberto Nicòtina and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-04 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth guide to researchers and practitioners who are interested in analyzing the evolution of EU law from a national and comparative constitutional law perspective. The volume deals with questions of how EU Member States’ constitutional systems, including the subnational tier, interact with the supranational level. It maps the evolution over time of constitutional strategies in the face of multi-level governance and individuates contextual factors on an empirical basis. The volume includes twelve national reports written by leading experts in constitutional and EU law, and in political science. The countries discussed include the six founding Member States, together with a selection of Member States in which a clear-cut evolution in the national constitutional approach towards the EU can be observed. These include the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom. The latter is included as an “extreme” case in which the change in constitutional strategy over time has resulted in withdrawing from the Union altogether. Taken together, the book assembles the building blocks of an explanatory theory of constitutional strategies in the face of multi-level governance. The volume will be of interest to students and researchers in comparative constitutional law, political science and multidisciplinary EU studies. It will also be a valuable resource for policy-makers.
Download or read book Frontiers of Equality in the Development of EU and US Citizenship written by Jeremy B. Bierbach and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a framework for comparing EU citizenship and US citizenship as standards of equality. If we wish to understand the legal development of the citizenship of the European Union and its relationship to the nationalities of the member states, it is helpful to examine the history of United States citizenship and, in particular, to elaborate a theory of ‘duplex’ citizenships found in federal orders. In such a citizenship, each person’s citizenship is necessarily ‘layered’ with the citizenship or nationality of a (member) state. The question this book answers is: how does federal citizenship, as a claim to equality, affect the relationship between the (member) state and its national or citizen? Because the book places equality, not allegiance to a sovereign at the center of its analysis of citizenship, it manages to escape traditional analyses of the EU that measure it by the standard of a sovereign state. The text presents a coherent account of the development of EU citizenship and EU civil rights for those who wish to understand their continuing development in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Scholars and legal practitioners of EU law will find novel insights in this book into how EU citizenship works, in order to be able to grasp the direction in which it will continue to develop. And it may be of great interest to American scholars of law and political science who wish to understand one aspect of how the EU works as a constitutional order, not merely as an order of international law, by comparison to their own history. Jeremy Bierbach is an attorney at Franssen Advocaten in Amsterdam. He holds a Ph.D. in European constitutional law from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Download or read book EU Enlargement and the Constitutions of Central and Eastern Europe written by Anneli Albi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the EU's biggest enlargement, this book explores the adaptation of the constitutions of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) for membership in the European Union. In response to the painful past, these new constitutions were notably closed to transfer of powers to international organizations, and accorded a prominent status to sovereignty and independence. A little more than a decade later, the process of amending these provisions in view of the transfer of sovereign powers to a supranational organization has proved a sensitive and controversial exercise. This book analyses the amendments against the background of comparative experience and theory of sovereignty, as well as the context of political sensitivities, such as rising euroscepticism ahead of accession referendums.
Download or read book The Constitutionalization of the European Union written by Berthold Rittberger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previously published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy, this volume presents a theory of constitutionalization as well as comparative analyses and case studies to underscore the claim that the European integration process itself engenders a democratic self-healing mechanism. There exists a consensus among academics, politicians, and the public that the European Union suffers from a ‘democratic deficit’. But how can it be resolved? This book deals with two core areas central for the development of the liberal-democratic constitutional state: the extension of the powers of representative assemblies and the institutionalization of human rights. The European Union has made remarkable progress in these two areas over the past half century. Whenever a planned step of European integration through transfers of sovereignty threatens to undermine domestic standards of parliamentary control and human rights standards, political elites in the member states regularly mobilize to counteract these developments. The proponents of the Union’s ‘constitutionalization’ regularly invoke democratic and human rights norms shared by all members of the European Union to successfully exercise moral pressure on the sceptics of further constitutionalization.
Download or read book A Constitution Like Any Other Comparing the European Constitution with Nation State Constitutions written by Stefan Voigt and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Treaty of Lisbon is analyzed as the constitution of the European Union drawing on the tools of constitutional economics. It is shown that (i) the increased number of policy areas to which the newly created ordinary legislation procedure will be applied is likely to lead to more legislation. (ii) The creation of a president of the European Council will not make the Union presidential. (iii) The subsidiarity principle in combination with the monitoring competence of the national parliaments is unlikely to create an important brake to ever more centralization. (iv) Since citizens' initiatives do not have any formally binding effects, they are unlikely to have any such effects factually. (v) The Charter of Fundamental Rights gives the ECJ yet another tool to enhance its influence which it is expected to use. (vi) The possibility of exiting from the Union is unlikely to change much, as the Union could not have prevented any member state from exiting even before. (vii) The tremendous hurdles to explicitly change the constitution in combination with the large number of memberstates further re-enforce the influence of the ECJ. It is further discussed whether the allocation of competences can be said to have created a “new separation of powers."
Download or read book Local Government in the Member States of the European Union A Comparative Legal Perspective written by Ángel Manuel Moreno and published by INAP. This book was released on 2012 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obra de referencia en cuanto al análisis de la administración local, en el marco de los países de la Unión europea, tratado por los principales especialistas en la materia. Contenido: Capítulo 1. Local government in Austria // Capítulo 2. Local government in Belgium // Capítulo 3. Local government in Bulgaria // Capítulo 4. Local government in Cyprus // Capítulo 5.Local Government in Czech Republic // Capítulo 6. Local government in Denmark // Capítulo 7. Local Government in Estonia // Capítulo 8. Local government in Finland // Capítulo 9. Local Government in France // Capítulo 10. Local government in Germany // Capítulo 11. Local government in Greece // Capítulo 24. Local government in Slovenia // Capítulo 25. Local government in Spain // Capítulo 26. Local government in Sweden // Capítulo 27. Local government in Uk.
Download or read book CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY In the Member State of the European Union written by Victor Cătălin and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book of political science that proposes a method of evaluating constitutional democracy, based on the idea that the level of democracy of a state is the one established by its constitution. The method is applied, as a case study, to the Member States of the European Union. The results obtained by comparing the level of constitutional democracy could be the basis for thinking about the future of the European Union.
