The paper deals with the question: To what extent do different rules found in constitutions reflect the political preferences of political actors (and thus the political constellation) at the moment of constitution writing? This question is highly relevant for two reasons. First, constitutions shall be valid for a long time and therefore usually contain amendment rules that are more rigid than the rules for amending regular laws. A constitution that mirrors unbalanced individual preferences risks being disregarded by future majorities and societal actors. Second, constitutional theory and empirical research on constitution-writing have not yet provided us with secure empirical findings about how open political actors are to compromises in different fields (e.g. rights, state organization) that are covered by constitutions.
In order to answer the question, a five-year research project on constitution writing in the five new German Lander after 1990 was carried out whose results shall be presented in the paper. The selection of cases uses the historically unique situation of one political system falling apart into five separate political systems. In this most-similar-systems-design general characteristics of the institutional framework and its environment (social structure of the electorate, history, culture, economy) are held constant in order to be able to detect the effects of the varying political constellations in the Lander on the contents of the constitutions under negotiation. The fact that all constitutions under discussion are ‘full constitutions’ guarantees that the findings potentially may be generalizable for all parliamentary political systems.
Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Qualitative research relied on roundtable and other interviews with political actors and experts, on document analysis and secondary data. Quantitative analysis included the construction of an index for measuring the extent to which political actors wanted to bind future governmental majorities by the constitution in the following highly conflictive domains: rights, citizens’ participation, government and parliament (opposition),state and religion/church, past and elites of the former regime.
