Populist Constitutionalism

In recent decades, constitutional reform appears to be gaining momentum (see Ginsburg and Melton 2015: 4). One might argue that we are experiencing times of ‘constitutional acceleration’ (Palermo 2007), in that political actors appear to be increasingly taking recourse to the instrument of constitutional reform. Innovative, popular forms of constitutional reform have emerged, which stress the importance of, and bring into constitutional practice, citizen participation in constitutional reform. But the people is equally a central dimension in a different type of engagement with constitutionalism, a phenomenon which can be identified as populist constitutionalism . In the European context, with which this chapter is predominantly concerned, populist engagement with processes of constitution-making and constitutional reform is a distinctive, and in some significant ways worrying, tendency. The chapter provides an attempt to more systematically conceptualize populist constitutionalism, predominantly focusing on the European context. While there is some emerging literature on the phenomenon of populist constitutionalism (Mudde 2013; Müller 2016; Thio 2012), a more robust and theoretical treatment of the relation between populism and constitutionalism stills appears absent.