How did new forms of mass politics and culture that included and gave voice to all men and women finally develop in Britain between 1885 and 1931?

Chapter 5 is comparative in nature and explores the enactment of legislation in two federal polities, namely the United States and Germany. The objective of this chapter is to highlight that while national legislative processes are dominated by party politics, the European legislative process is dominated by trilogues – to some extent, trilogues make up for the absence of a genuine party system at EU level. It is within and between political parties and trilogues, respectively, that positions are discussed, coalitions cemented, institutional interdependences managed, political differences solved, and compromise brokered. When legislative files eventually reach the floor of the competent legislative institutions, their fate is – most of the time – already sealed. This chapter aims at highlighting that leaving legislative and interchamber coordination to party structures is no more – and possibly less – democratically accountable than entrusting it to trilogues, especially in times of strong partisanship and grand coalitions.

Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with the concept of political party as David Hume. This chapter considers Hume’s various essays that treated the phenomenon of party between 1741 and 1758. In his first essays on party, he showed how both the Whig-Tory and Court-Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and inter-parliamentary conflict. In this way, he sought to transcend the arguments of the Court Whig ministry and the Country party opposition alike. Writing a new set of essays in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hume turned to the parties’ ideological systems, as he tried to show that neither the Whig system of the ‘original contract’ nor the Tory system of passive obedience held water if philosophically probed, but that they could both have salutary consequences. While critical, Hume continued to give a fair hearing to both parties in his final essay on the subject, ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ (1758). Though he ultimately wrote in favour of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, this chapter concludes that Hume may have approximated the ideal of non-partisanship as far as was possible in a divided society.

Chapter 1 focuses on constitution-making and constitutional reform processes. After providing a brief historical overview of the four waves of constitution-drafting in the Arab world, this chapter examines closely the post-Arab Spring constitution-making and constitutional reform processes, focusing on the following elements: The body in charge of drafting the constitution and the role played by the ruling regime (“bottom-up” vs. “top-down” processes); the degree of openness and transparency of the process; the duration of the process; the role played by political parties; the role of civil society; the role played by external actors; the influence of previous domestic constitutions and their “reactivation”; and the influence of foreign constitutional models. The chapter shows that the vast majority of these processes were characterized by major flaws and shortcomings, a fact that had a negative impact on the legitimacy and sense of ownership of these texts and, ultimately, on the transition processes as a whole. Although it should not be idealized, the process that led to the adoption of the 2014 Tunisian Constitution was to a large extent a positive exception.

This chapter traces how, in an increasingly unstable domestic and regional context, the ruling coalition of religion and secular nationalists promoted a “Turkish-Islamist Synthesis 2.0” (TIS 2.0). This agenda infused the anti-pluralist, Turkish-Islamic synthesis of the 1980s with an attempt to Islamicize public life. Such efforts culminated in a major critical juncture: abandonment of Turkey’s 150-year-old parliamentary tradition for an executive presidency.

The consolidation of the TIS 2.0 enlivened resistance among diverse groups who came together in the seventh major pluralizing coalition since the late Ottoman period. Coalescing around multiple – but not always compatible – visions of living in diversity, the coalition brought together pro-secular Turks on the right and left including municipal actors, youth, women and LGBTQ+ activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and environmentalists, among others. Innovating frames for political, religious, ethnic, and gender pluralism, the coalition registered a major success, retaking city governments in the 2019 elections, an outcome it repeated in 2024.

This chapter analyzes recent conservative efforts to build parties in Latin America. Its main case study is Argentina’s Republican Proposal (PRO) party, one of the most important examples of conservative party-building in Latin America. This chapter explains the success of right-wing parties born in nonauthoritarian contexts through the strategic decisions of leaders about whether to invest in high-cost resources (ideational and organizational) that will allow parties to take root in inhospitable contexts. This chapter demonstrates that the competitiveness of right-wing parties has been driven by three factors: programmatic innovation by personalistic leaders; organizational mobilization of both core and noncore constituencies; and an elite fear of the "Venezuela model."

In the conclusion, we review the book’s chapters and argue that Latin America has experienced a resurgence of conservative forces in recent years. We analyze the supply and demand of a broad set of conservative alternatives, paying special attention to the processes of party-building, adaptation, and rebranding. We find that new right-wing forces often have weak organizations, but have been able to mobilize voters along noneconomic cleavages, including security, gender politics, and reproductive rights. The adoption of a highly conservative profile has allowed parties to access lower-class constituencies and mobilize mass support among them. The politicization of cultural issues, such as LGBT rights and religious identities, has contributed to polarization and the rise of populist radical right parties. These parties have flourished within the context of political and economic shocks and benefited from cultural backlashes and the crises of traditional right-wing parties. In these situations, politics becomes a zero-sum game and the stakes get higher. Democratic stability in the region is arguably at its most tenuous state since the age of military dictatorships. Interrupted presidencies have become realities in many countries over the past fifteen years, raising concerns about democratic stability and potential threats to democratic institutions.

In recent decades, Latin America has experienced a resurgence of the political right after the “left turn” of the 2000s. The introduction argues that right-wing parties have adapted to social and political changes by emphasizing cultural issues, mobilizing voters along salient political cleavages, and crafting distinctive party platforms and political identities. It also introduces a typology of right-wing parties and movements that captures the diversity of the post-2000 Latin American right in both ideological and organizational terms. Looking at the demand side, the introduction sets the stage for our analysis of the changes and continuities in the attitudes of Latin American electorates. On the supply side, the introduction sets the groundwork for mapping the programmatic features that distinguish the post-2000 political right from right-wing parties created in previous eras. Finally, the introduction presents an outline of the book and summarizes its main findings.

The burgeoning literature in comparative constitutional has not devoted sufficient attention to the constitutional functions of political parties, nor has it systematically explored the constitutional law of electoral design. This volume examines the constitutional treatment of parties and elections both as a matter of constitutional theory and from the perspective of historical and contemporary practice. To this end, it draws together a series of contributions from a diverse range of scholars working in distinct disciplines. Political scientists tend to treat political parties as their key object of study, while comparative constitutional lawyers have largely ignored them, preferring to focus on other institutional question. What follows brings each perspective into conversation with the other.

The chapter discusses constitutional rules on political and electoral systems and political parties. While constitutions in Anglophone African countries are maximalist, Francophone Africa countries tend to be constitutionally minimalist on electoral and political party regulation, leaving key aspects of electoral systems for presidents, legislature and election management bodies to statutory regulation, which has led to instances of controversial and regressive reforms. Despite the differences, however, the relevant constitutional rules have remained relatively stable, and democratic backsliding often happens through irregular processes and legal reform, rarely through constitutional change, except presidential term limits. Fundamentally, the chapter argues that the winner-takes-all nature of politics constitutes the principal scourge of democratization in Africa, incentivizing attempts to manipulate and violate electoral and party rules. Accordingly, to enable progress in constitutional democracy, ensure stability of the rules of the game, and preclude abusive changes, constitution makers should recognize the manifestations of and tackle winner-takes-all politics, including through the recognition and empowerment of opposition groups.

Recent years have witnessed the rise of a range of authoritarian populist, illiberal, far-right, nativist, and extremist parties. We have seen democratic structures threatened or incrementally dismantled through the subversion of an established democratic party by an outsider or ascendance of the extremist wing of a right-wing party. Parties and party leaders occupying an ill-defined space on the political spectrum today generally present a much greater threat to democratic governance than overtly antidemocratic fringe outfits. The ambiguity of such parties, their growing size, their entry into government, the subversion of “good” democratic parties by a “bad” leadership, and the rise of the “shadow party” mean that contemporary political party threats seriously frustrate the possibility of remedial action afforded by existing public law and policy mechanisms. They also require us to reflect anew on crafting novel remedies and to revisit our assumptions about parties as creatures of central constitutional importance.

Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in constitutional provisions regulating core aspects of democracy, including the rules about parties, voting, and elections. The trend is apparent in both democracies and nondemocracies, although democracies tend to constitutionalize slightly more matters. Constitutionalization can help democracy by tying the hands of politicians. Looking at cross-national data, we find that constitutionalizing democracy is correlated with higher levels of democracy. Constitutionalization of democracy carries advantages as well as risks. We illustrate the dynamics with short case studies of Kenya and Thailand.

This chapter explores the promise of “semi-parliamentarism” by asking whether it can be adapted to suggest versions of non-parliamentary regimes that better reconcile the values of democratic governance and address the contemporary challenges of party polarization and fragmentation. The focus is not on which regime type is superior overall but on how to maximize the potential benefits of semi-parliamentarism through ambitious, but not wholesale, design reforms in the face of current democratic challenges. Specifically, I argue that semi-parliamentarism’s core feature of “symmetrical” and “incongruent” bicameralism is detachable from parliamentarism and that, with suitable customization, is available in presidential and semi-presidential versions that may reduce the pathologies of party systems and better balance the underlying values of democratic governance than existing regimes of these types. The adapted forms may also address some of the causes, and resist some of the consequences, of democratic backsliding in general and authoritarian populism in particular.

In this chapter, I first argue that the key function that parties perform, when functioning as they ought to function, is to facilitate a mutually responsive relationship between public policy and popular opinion by acting as an intermediary between a state and its people. They perform this intermediary function in a unique manner, because of their bi-directionality and their plenary character. When they perform this function effectively, political parties significantly reduce four key information and transaction costs that would otherwise make democratic governance impossible: political participation costs, voters’ information costs, policy packaging costs, and ally prediction costs. I further identify four normative principles in relation to political parties: viz, the purposive autonomy principle, the party system optimality principle, the party-state separation principle, and the ‘anti-faction principle. These political principles are drawn from the value of democracy itself. As such, they should – alongside other relevant political and constitutional norms – inform fundamental constitutional design choices.