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Abusive Constitutionalism, David Landau

Scholarly Publications

This paper identifies an increasingly important phenomenon: the use of mechanisms of constitutional change to erode the democratic order. A rash of recent incidents in a diverse group of countries such as Hungary, Egypt, and Venezuela has shown that the tools of constitutional amendment and replacement can be used by would-be autocrats to undermine democracy with relative ease. Since military coups and other blatant ruptures in the constitutional order have fallen out of favor, actors instead rework the constitutional order with subtle changes in order to make themselves difficult to dislodge and to disable or pack courts and other accountability …