Democratic Ethics, Constitutional Dimensions, and Constitutionalisms

This chapter develops a number of analytical tools and ideal-typical models to investigate the relationship between constitutions and their politico-cultural environment. One can distinguish a number of ways in which constitutions can be open to politico-ethical repertoires: they can reflect them, as well as being the object of, influence on or reinforcement of them. One way of approaching the legal politico-cultural entanglement analytically is to distinguish between the range of constitutional dimensions. The predominant, negative understanding of constitutionalism prioritizes an instrumental or political dimension – that is, the constitution understood as a ‘political map’, as a way of both limiting power and delimiting spheres of autonomy – as well as a formal-participatory dimension in which participation is limited to the retrieval of existing rights. However, the constitution can also be said to reflect another, cultural and symbolic dimension, which more specifically includes a normative dimension in terms of the expression of ultimate, politico-ethical values, an identity-shaping dimension, a positive, aspirational dimension of substantive ends, and a politico-participatory dimension.