Bulletin n. 3/2011
February 2012
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Jan Erk
    The Sociology of Constitutional Politics: Demos, Legitimacy and Constitutional Courts in Canada and Germany
    in Regional and Federal Studies , Volume 21, Issue 4-5 ,  2011 ,  523-538
    There are longue durée patterns that differentiate the behaviour of constitutional courts in multi-nation and mono-nation federations. While constitutional courts in multi-nation federations let politics take primacy over jurisprudence, constitutional courts in mono-nation federations play an important role in bringing about constitutional change. Instead of relying on institutional/constitutional factors to explain this variation, the article proposes a sociological explanation based on differences in democratic legitimacy between mono-nation federations based on a single demos and multi-nation ones where the federation represents a union between multiple demoi. The argument is applied to the paired comparison of the Canadian Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court.
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