“This article casts fresh critical light on ongoing debates about political constitutionalism. It focuses on political constitutionalist thought within British constitutional discourse. Although it is possible to detect traces of political constitutionalist thought in the United States,2 Canada,3 New Zealand,4 China 5 and some South Asian states,6 the British tradition still dominates the literature and often inspires accounts within these states. This British tradition has been shaped around ongoing debates about the UK’s changing constitution and the dominant political ideologies within the UK’s political system. Through an interpretative inquiry, I use ideologies to uncover the logical and cultural assumptions different political constitutionalists hold about democracy, politics and constitutions.7”

ABSTRACT – For many political constitutionalists, the ordinary democratic process should be the constitution; constitutional entrenchment and strong-form judicial review should be avoided. But how is ordinary democratic politics understood by political constitutionalists? To answer this question, this article engages in an interpretative inquiry to delineate four distinct ideological readings of political constitutionalism—democratic socialist, liberal, republican and conservative—that are alive within the existing literature. It does so to explain how these readings articulate subtly different understandings of ordinary democratic politics. In doing so, it reflects on how to identify political constitutionalist thought; how political constitutionalism can appeal to different ideologies; how ideologies have influenced the theory’s intellectual development; and the ideological conditions required to sustain a political constitution.

AUTHOR(S)/ARTICLE – Robert Greally, Ideologies of Political Constitutionalism, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2024;, gqae028, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqae028

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 – Ideologies
00:00:55 – Abstract
00:01:50 – 1. Introduction
00:07:15 – 2. Political Constitutionalism as a ‘Thin’ Constitutional Ideology – A. The Central Case of Political Constitutionalism
00:15:12 – B. Thin and Thick Ideologies
00:17:50 – C. What Are Ideologies?
00:23:03 – D. Summary
00:24:05 – 3. Democratic Socialism
00:25:45 – A. Socialism, Freedom and Democracy
00:28:35 – B. A (Socialist) Government that Can Govern
00:33:00 – 4. Liberalism
00:34:13 – A. Waldron’s Liberal Freedom
00:38:19 – B. Limited Government
00:42:24 – 5. Republicanism – A. Freedom via Non-domination
00:45:01 – B. Non-domination by Audi Alteram Partem or Throwing the Scoundrels Out?
00:52:46 – 6. Conservativism
00:54:31 – A. Conservativism as a Sui Generis Ideology
01:01:30 – B. Strong but Limited Government
01:05:59 – 7. Maintaining a Dynamic Political Constitution
01:07:09 – A. Ideological Diversity or Ideological Consensus
01:11:31 – B. Ideological Diversity as Constitutional Imagination
01:16:56 – 8. Conclusion

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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