Political Culture and Constitutionalism: A Comparative Approach

A Comparative Approach

Daniel P. Franklin, Michael J. Baun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315483238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work is a cross-national examination of the relationship between political culture and constitutionalism. The countries studied include Nigeria, Turkey and Japan. Questions explored include whether constitutions must evolve and whether constitutionalism is only a western concept.

Part I
Evolutionary Constitutionalism

Britain, the United States, and Canada can best be termed evolutionary democracies. In examining the following three cases, the reader should note that, in each instance, the constitutional state developed gradually, over a long period of time. As one of the authors in this section pointed out to us in the planning of this book, Britain is by no means the “mother of modern democracy,” since the principle of “one person, one vote” was not institutionalized there until the middle of the nineteenth century. Canada did not adopt a written constitution until 1982. And, as anyone who is even the most cursory student of American history knows, while the Constitution of the United States is a marvelous and creative construct, the original document recognized slavery and permitted states to restrict the voting franchise to only a very limited population of propertied, white males.

We therefore have to wonder of what relevance these cases are to the modern context. To ask the citizens of developing countries to bear the burden of a restrictive and limited constitutional state for several generations may not be a viable option in today’s world. For one thing, modern communications have served to universalize concepts of human rights and political representation. One of the great advantages enjoyed by the United States and Canada was their development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in “splendid isolation.” Other states cannot follow the same path. Populations and, indeed, the international community will not tolerate the limitations of the abbreviated constitutional state that existed for long periods of time in each of the three cases that follow.

Therefore, what we are most likely to observe in these three accounts is a bit of history and three examples of a mature constitutional state. The British, American, and Canadian examples represent a set of ends to be pursued but not necessarily a set of means. The instrumentalities of constitution building that are likely to be transferred to other states from these examples are the attempts at “fine tuning” that occur in any constitutional regime as it adapts to the changing political environment. The U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 is such an example, as is the construct of the new Canadian Constitution. These are the sort of reforms that represent a “second wave” of constitutional development.

1
Political Culture and Constitutionalism in Britain

William B. Gwyn

Political development in Britain has been largely endogenous, and change has been slow and piecemeal rather than abrupt and radical. The English have lived continuously under some form of representative government since the close of the thirteenth century, and the Scots almost as long. Unlike many other countries in the world today that have experienced conquest and often colonization by other powers during the past two centuries, England has not been conquered or dominated by another state since 1066. Nor has there been a successful internal rebellion since 1688, and that one was aimed at preserving and extending the existing constitutional system. The absence of external conquest and internal revolution, as well as a cautious and pragmatic attitude toward institutional innovation, has meant that, while the character of representative government in Britain has changed immensely over the course of the past three hundred years, change has taken place gradually. The result of this type of institutional change has been that many people have been unaware of its taking place, and concern about it has therefore been minimal. It has also meant that some of the most important innovations in the British constitution cannot be dated with precision.

Political Culture and the Structure of Politics

Since the eighteenth century, commentators on Britain have stressed that its political elites and the population generally tend to take a cautious, pragmatic, undogmatic, untheoretical, and incremental approach toward problem solving. Visiting England in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville observed:

The spirit of English legislation is an incomprehensible mixture of the spirits of innovation and routine, which perfects the details of laws without noticing their principles; which always goes ahead in a straight line, taking step after step in the direction it happens to be in; which exhausts its skill in mending, and does not create except, so to say, without knowing it and by chance; the most restless for improvement and the well being of society, but the least systematic seeker for these things.¹

Walter Bagehot was referring to this same characteristic in 1867 when he wrote that the best way to lead members of the House of Commons was “to affect a studied and illogical moderation.” MPs were “common Englishmen, and, as Father Newman complains, 'hard to work up to the dogmatic level.' They are not eager to press the tenets of their party to impossible conclusions.”² In 1928, the Spanish writer Salvador de Madariaga emphasized this same aspect of British political culture in contrasting English national character with that of the French and the Spaniards.³ More recently it has been described by the Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori, who distinguished between “rational” and “empirical” mentalities, the first associated with France and certain other continental European countries including his own Italy and the second with England, the United States, and other English-speaking countries.

While the empirical (empirico-pragmatic) mentality stays in medias res, close to what can be seen and touched, the rationalist mentality soars to a higher level of abstraction and hence tends to be far removed from facts. While the former is inclined to accept reality, the raison tends to reject reality in order to re-make it in its own image; while empiricism tends to be anti-dogmatic and tentative, rationalism tends to be dogmatic and definitive; while the former is eager to learn from experience and to proceed by testing and retesting, the latter goes ahead without tests; while the empiricist is not deeply concerned with rigorous coherence and distrusts long chains of demonstration, the rationalist is intransigent about the necessity for deductive consistency.⁴

Sartori attributed the success of democracy in Britain and the United States largely to the dominance of this empirical mentality, and English conservative political writers from Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century to Michael Oakeshott in the twentieth have articulated it as normative doctrine. In the opinion of the British political scientist Philip Norton, “It constitutes the most significant aspect of British political culture.”⁵

Most evidence for this important cultural trait is impressionistic, but some research using elite interviewing confirms its existence. A century after Bagehot’s remarks, Robert D. Putnam investigated the political beliefs and attitudes of British and Italian parliamentarians and concluded:

Italians treat problems of public policy more theoretically and deductively than the British, making more frequent reference to future Utopias and explicit ideologies. Italians more frequently find ideological satisfactions in their political activity. Italians use more comprehensive and articulated social theories to account for party politics.⁶

The differences between his British and Italian respondents were especially great with regard to whether they dealt with issues in terms of general principles or particular details and whether they reasoned about them deductively or inductively. While only 19 percent of the British MPs were extreme or moderate “generalizes,” 42 percent of their Italian counterparts fell into that category. The pattern was reversed for extreme and moderate “particularizers,” which included 56 percent of the British parliamentarians and only 23 percent of the Italians. As might be expected, the results concerning inductive and deductive thinking were very similar.⁷

Although recognizing that phenomena such as the speed of social, economic, and political change and the degree of social conflict might partly account for these striking differences between British and Italian legislators, Putnam concluded, “The single most important part of the explanation has to do with contrasting national values. Intellect is highly prized in Italian culture. Verbal and logical abilities are sought out and strengthened by the educational system. Intellectuals are greatly esteemed.” Slightly more than half of Putnam’s Italian respondents stressed intellectual ability as an essential quality of political leadership, and only one in six failed to mention it at all. In contrast, intellectual ability was stressed by fewer than one in twelve of his British respondents. He also found that while Italian political leaders were more intellectual than their followers in the legislature, the contrary was the case in Britain.⁸ Certainly very few major political leaders in Britain could be characterized as theorizers or ideologues. The leaders of Britain’s major political parties are almost always drawn from their moderate, center membership rather than from left or right extremists, who are far more likely to be ideologues. Margaret Thatcher, a self-described “conviction politician,” who entered office as prime minister in 1979 articulating a brand of antistatist, free market conservatism that she set about implementing with great determination, is a rare exception.

The pragmatic, nontheoretical, incremental approach toward political change, along with the pride many people take in the antiquity of existing institutions, appears to have had considerable influence in determining the character of constitutional democracy in Britain, which is very unusual in several respects. First, democracy itself, in the sense of a democratic electorate, was introduced into the country very slowly and incrementally over more than a century. Second, even after the arrival of a fully democratic suffrage, the British have continued to retain several governmental institutions from their predemocratic past: an electoral system that ignores the existence of political parties, a hereditary monarch, and a nonelected, largely hereditary House of Lords. Rather than scrapping these institutions, the British have adapted them to the requirements of a democratic political system. Third, the evolution of the current regime has taken place in the absence of any so-called written constitution incorporating major norms regulating the structure of government and limiting its operations.

For centu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Political Culture and Constitutionalism
• Part I: Evolutionary Constitutionalism
• Part II: Constitutionalism in “Remade” Democracies
• Part III: Constitutionalism and Modernization in the Semiperiphery
• Part IV: Constitutionalism in Postcolonial States
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Questionnaire on Constitutionalism and Political Culture
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index