Amending the constitution

Legal Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92
Author(s):  
Ian Cram
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Civic Society ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
Managed Change ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
The Uk

How easy ought it to be to enact constitutional amendment? In the absence of constitutionally prescribed procedures, fundamental reforms in the UK can often appear hurried, under-consultative and controlled by transient political majorities. In the recent referendum on Scottish independence, the NO campaign's promise of additional powers to Holyrood in the face of a possible ‘Yes’ vote appears to fit this pattern (even if, for reasons of political sensitivity, it was not driven directly by members of the Coalition government). A recent sample of concluded constitutional reforms, including the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 and the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, have drawn criticism from within Westminster on the grounds of defective process. Specific options to improve pre-parliamentary and parliamentary stages of constitutional reform have been proposed with a view to attaining principled procedures of constitutional reform removed from executive control that signal attachment to process values such as wide and effective consultation, deliberation outside and inside Parliament, and informed scrutiny. The foregoing prescriptions for remedying defective processes may, however, be said in the ultimate analysis to retain a normative preference for a more formal, elite-managed vision of constitutional change that is premised upon a limited conception of the citizens' ‘informed consent’. In any case, in purely descriptive terms, top-down managed change does not capture the totality of patterns of past constitutional reform in the UK. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, radical grassroots campaigns for the extension of the franchise resulted ultimately in universal adult suffrage. More recently, the Scotland Act 1998 can be seen as the culmination of a civic society–led, deliberative engagement with ordinary voters over decades that offered an alternative vision of ‘bottom-up’ constitutional reform to that seen in more formal, elite-led processes of constitutional reform. The inclusive and participatory nature of the campaign for Scottish devolution marked out a radically different model of constitutional reform to that which has typified Westminster-style amendment and which is still largely directed by political elites. In such circumstances as prevail currently at Westminster, it is difficult to give much credence to claims that the outcomes of constitutional reform processes enjoy the ‘informed consent’ of the people.

Unconventional Politics: The Campaign for a Balanced-Budget Amendment Constitutional Convention in the 1970s

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
IWAN MORGAN
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Fiscal Discipline ◽  
Constitutional Convention ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Balanced Budget

The drive to enact a constitutional amendment requiring balanced federal budgets has been a defining issue of American politics in the final decade of the twentieth century. Supporters of this measure deemed it the only way to break the cycle of huge deficits that inflated the national debt to almost unmanageable proportions in recent years. In 1995, 1996 and 1997 only the Senate's narrow failure to deliver the requisite two-thirds majority – latterly by a single vote – prevented Congress proposing an amendment for ratification by the states. Nevertheless the balanced-budget amendment campaign is not a product of the deficit-conscious 1990s. It originated in the 1970s as a movement by the states to impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Between 1975 and 1979 thirty states petitioned Congress for a convention to write a balanced-budget amendment. The convention method of constitutional reform had lain unused since the Founding Fathers devised it as an alternative to congressional initiative, but the support of only four more states would have provided the two-thirds majority needed for its implementation. The states' campaign stalled at this juncture in the face of opposition from the Carter administration and congressional Democrats. By then, however, it had done much to popularize the balanced-budget amendment and make it part of the nation's political agenda.This article seeks to analyze the development of the balanced-budget amendment constitutional convention campaign and to assess its historical significance. Aside from its relevance to today's fiscal politics, the movement merits attention as an important episode in the history of the 1970s, an era when economic problems at home and defeat abroad underlined the limits of America's prosperity and power. In this troubled time, popular confidence in the nation's political leaders underwent marked decline. The Watergate scandal, failure in Vietnam and economic stagflation created doubts about their trustworthiness and competence to deal with America's problems. The budget revolt by the states was a manifestation of this anti-Washington mood. In style as well as substance, the campaign challenged conventional politics: it manifested distrust in elected leaders to manage public finances without constitutional restraint and sought to bypass establishment control of the orthodox forms of politics through adoption of an untested process of constitutional change. In many respects the drive for a balanced-budget amendment convention was an expression of the same populist impulse that was the mainspring of Jimmy Carter's campaign for president in 1976. The former Georgia governor's status as a political outsider untainted by previous connection with Washington had been his greatest electoral asset, but in office this man-of-the-people aligned himself with the nation's political establishment against the convention campaign. Analysis of Carter's response to this movement casts light on the ambiguity and complexity of his presidential politics.

scholarly journals Making politics educational: the experience of the Scottish referendum on independence

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Crowther
Keyword(s):  
Political Process ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Opting Out ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Scottish Government ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Unusual Situation

<p class="Body1">In 2014 the issue of constitutional change in the UK brought about by an agreement between the UK and Scottish Government, for a referendum on Scottish independence, created the motivation for widespread political engagement with the formal political process. Scottish citizens – including newly enfranchised 16 and 17 year olds – were debating, discussing and disagreeing about opting out of one of the world’s richest countries. This was an unusual situation and one that nearly happened despite a hostile corporate, political and mainstream media response to the demand for independence. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this movement for change was the result of narrow-minded nationalism. Although the Referendum result was that Scotland should remain in the UK the process also produced widespread politicization of ordinary people. The cultural politics of communities had engaged with the political culture of the state and the dialectic between the two generated educational experiences and opened up new political possibilities.</p><div><p class="Body1"> </p></div>

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hearn
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
The Uk

The epilogue pulls back from the study presented to place it in the context of general patterns of national identity and recent and on going constitutional change in the UK. It explores how this case study relates to recent political events that have happened since the time of fieldwork, including the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014, the UK Brexit Referendum of 2016, and the changing compositions of party systems in Scotland and the UK as a whole. It suggests that these events, like the formation of HBOS and its crisis, reflect deep and rapid economic, political and social changes, and illustrate the human struggle to make sense of and act towards an often imponderable future.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 307-322
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bradbury
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Territorial Politics ◽  
The Uk

The book has provided four sets of conclusions. First, the examination of territorial strain, the nature of territorial problems and the characteristics of background conditions gives us a lens through which to evaluate critically the social, economic and cultural context to territorial politics. The second set of conclusions relate to the approaches used in the movements for territorial constitutional change in exploiting the support they did have and overcoming those weaknesses that still existed. As part of the reality of how territorial change happens it is to be expected that in the particular case of the UK that all territorial movements emerged out of party political contestation and self-interested party choices, and then had to define approaches heavily determined by party constraints. The third set of conclusions relate to UK central government. The UK centre was also in part defined by the pursuit of party power, and the key party at the UK level ready to address territorial constitutional reform — the Labour Party — faced large challenges and anxieties after 18 years out of office when they prepared for the 1997 general election. The final set of conclusions relate to the importance of constitutional policy processes to the resolution of conflicts in centre–periphery relations. Approaches to the development of devolution policy were followed which made the best efforts to achieve territorial balance under the constraints that they faced. The policy processes in Scotland and Northern Ireland achieved sometimes high, but at least sufficient, levels of inclusiveness in their mechanisms of negotiation.

scholarly journals The Scottish independence referendum and the participatory turn in UK constitution-making: The move towards a constitutional convention

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
SILVIA SUTEU
Keyword(s):  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Convention ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Constitution Making

Abstract:This article looks at the continued calls for popular participation in UK constitution-making following the 2014 Scottish independence and 2016 Brexit referendums. In particular, it discusses the prospect of a UK constitutional convention being set up to deliberate upon and make recommendations concerning constitutional reform. The article proceeds by first mapping the arguments in favour of setting up such a body in a country with little but growing experience with direct democracy. It then analyses three difficulties surrounding a UK constitutional convention: deciding on a manageable mandate, identifying the political community or communities it is to represent and the method for selecting its membership, and defining the place of such a convention within the UK’s broader constitution-making mechanisms. The article highlights fundamental unknowns in need of clarification before such an instrument could be used while at the same time admitting the limitations of a constitutional convention as a panacea for all of the UK’s constitutional woes. In exploring these questions, the article shows how constitutional reform debates in the UK are no less complex than were those surrounding Scottish independence and have been further compounded by Brexit.

scholarly journals ‘You know all them things’: Nostalgia, Idealization, and Speech in Working-Class Poems by Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-21
Author(s):  
William Fogarty
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
James Wright ◽  
The People ◽  
Lucille Clifton ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Uk

This essay examines nostalgia, idealization, and speech in poems from the latter half of the twentieth century in the US and the UK that convey working-class experience, identifying nostalgia as a binding feature of such poems and tracing it to the 18th -century ‘nostalgia poem.’ I will first establish briefly how nostalgia in poems by Philip Levine, James Wright, and Robert Hayden results in idealizations that resist sentimentality and then demonstrate that the various forms of local speech employed in some other post1945 poems about working-class life by Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton act as a stay against such idealization, effectively transforming them into more explicitly anticlassist –and, in the case of Brooks and Clifton, antiracist and antisexist –forms of social critique and defiance. Their poems interrupt and complicate the idealization of the familiar working-class surroundings they seek to reenter, familiar and familial realms that are not just temporal and spatial but linguistic. They honor their characters’ fortitude in the face of working-class encumbrances not by idealizing them but by concentrating on their working-class characters’ linguistic origins. Manifestations of local speech in these nostalgic poems amount to a poetic resource that disrupts idealizations of working-class experience, critiquing, in that process, classism and, in Brooks and Clifton, revealing classism’s intersections with racism and sexism. These poems don’t just desire to go back to earlier worlds but do go back linguistically to working-class, nonstandard languages – their particular forms of original local speech–that refuse the conditions that would subordinate those languages and the people who speak them.

Making the case for constitutional reform

2018 ◽  
pp. 107-108
Author(s):  
Alice Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Torres Strait Islander ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Indigenous Australians ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Democratic Nation

Recent discussions on whether or not to amend the Australian Constitution to ‘recognise’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are important and long overdue for many Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Federation in 1901 meant the loss of rights and freedoms for Indigenous Australians when the Constitution was made. Today, even after the changes brought about by the 1967 referendum, Australia is still the only democratic nation in the world with a Constitution with clauses that authorise discrimination on the basis of race (Davis & William 2015). Indeed, sub-section 51 of the Constitution allows the Commonwealth to make laws for the people of any race for whom they deem necessary, and section 25 allows the Commonwealth to disqualify individuals from voting because of their race. These disgraceful aspects of the Constitution have allowed such negative and damaging interferences in Indigenous Communities as the Howard government’s ‘Northern Territory Intervention’. Like Davis, I believe it is unacceptable for Australia as a modern liberal democracy to have a ‘race power’ in the Constitution (Davis 2008, p. 8), and so to eradicate that inequity, there must be a Constitutional amendment as well as a treaty put in place.

Activism and Popular Constitutionalism in Contemporary Vietnam

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 677-710 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bui Son ◽  
Pip Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Law And Society ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Analysis ◽  
Popular Constitutionalism

Based on Chinese constitutional analysis, political science, and law and society studies, we argue that work extending the application of popular constitutionalism to authoritarian states applies in Vietnam, as popular constitutionalism targets sites relevant to constitutional reform. We contend that popular constitutionalism located in authoritarian states requires three factors: a tradition of activism, space for reformist and pragmatic dialogue targeting constitutional change, and the political need for legitimacy. This article analyses activism in Vietnam, focusing on the lodging of Petition 72 with the Constitutional Amendment Drafting Commission in 2013, and the resulting responses. We conclude that this activism was pivotal in advocating for new constitutional norms, evidencing popular constitutionalism in Vietnam. The long history of Vietnamese scholar activism, the relative space for governance debates, and the political need for legitimacy made this possible. We also note that popular constitutionalism faces constraints in authoritarian states, which may shape its trajectory.

The Referendum in the UK’s Constitution: From Parliamentary to Popular Sovereignty?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart G White
Keyword(s):  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Constitutional Convention ◽  
The People ◽  
Parliamentary Sovereignty ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Eu

The 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU has led to much questioning of the place of the referendum in the UK’s constitution with a particular emphasis on the status of Parliamentary and popular sovereignty. Some commentary suggests that the UK has shifted from a constitution of Parliamentary sovereignty to one of the popular sovereignty. Drawing on A.V. Dicey’s discussion of the UK constitution in his Introduction to the Law of the Constitution, this article sets out the case that the referendum is the site of a change in the UK’s constitution. However, according to this case, the change is not accurately described as a shift from Parliamentary to popular sovereignty. It is better understood in terms of the emergence of a new constitutional convention which has altered the manner by which Parliament, as the legal sovereign, is kept subordinate to the ‘people’ as the political sovereign. The article offers some preliminary empirical assessment of this case for constitutional change and indicates areas for future research. These include considering the possible influence of democratic constitutionalist thinking in the UK’s use of referendums and the desirability and implications of a full transition to democratic constitutionalism.

State and Nation in the United Kingdom

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keating
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
National Identities ◽  
External Support ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Definitive Answer ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Key Questions

The United Kingdom is not a nation-state but a political union. It was formed by the coming together, over centuries, of territories which retained their own national identities and institutions. Key questions of demos (the people), telos (the purpose of union), ethos (binding values) and the locus of sovereignty were never definitively resolved. Since 1999, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have had their own self-governing institutions within the Union. Devolution was an effort to stabilize the Union in the face of centrifugal pressures, but it left the same key questions unresolved. The Union is now contested in all four of its component parts and fundamental questions are raised about the meaning of political, social and economic union. Unionism, as doctrine and practice appears to have lost its way, unable to adjust to devolution. Brexit has added to the strains because membership of the European Union provided an external support system for the union of the United Kingdom itself. Yet the UK cannot easily fall apart into its constituent nations, and public opinion still appears largely content with the idea of a plurinational union. There is no definitive answer to the question of state and nation within the United Kingdom.

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