Next Sunday (4th), Chileans will go to the polls to decide on the adoption of a proposal for the country’s new constitution, which has been criticized as “too progressive” because it includes measures such as expanding government spending ( at which Creation of national social security and health systems) without specifying where the funds are to come from to finance them, differentiated legal treatment of the native Chilean population, among others.
To do justice to dozens of ideas on the left side of the political spectrum, Chilean voters wrote a lengthy text containing 388 articles.
If adopted, the new constitution would have more than twice as many articles as the country’s current constitution, which came into force during the regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet (19731990), has been amended since redemocratization and contains 143 articles it were 129 until 2019, but there were additions to the legal regulations for the ongoing constitutive proceedings.
However, in a study published in 2014, two University of Michigan political science experts George Tsebelis and Dominic J. Nardi Jr. warned that, contrary to what Chilean voters advocate, longer constitutions do not necessarily mean more development and prosperity.
On the contrary: analyzing the constitutions of 32 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and their economic and political situation, they came to the conclusion that those with the longest charters were poorer and more corrupt.
Tsebelis and Nardi pointed out that it is more common for constitutional changes to be made in lengthy Magna Cartas, as their profusion of rules often limits the role of the current ruler.
“The results suggest that more detailed constitutions are amended more frequently, although they are more difficult to amend because they tend to contain restrictive provisions that impede the government’s ability to pass necessary or desired legislation,” the political scientists write.
Likewise, this government “delaying” also means that longer constitutions are associated with lower GDP per capita, the study found.
“We believe this correlation suggests that detailed constitutions are more likely to prevent governments from taking the necessary measures to counteract economic shocks,” Tsebelis and Nardi pointed out.
The two researchers pointed out that countries with more comprehensive charters appeared with poorer results in surveys by the World Bank and the NGO Transparency International. However, Tsebelis and Nardi said it was unclear whether corruption produced longer constitutions or vice versa.
“We could envision two different causal pathways. First, knowing that political elites cannot be trusted to pursue sound economic policies, writers can pass lengthy constitutions aimed at fighting corruption. Alternatively, corrupt interest groups could persuade constitutional writers to protect their interests from future troubles. In that case, longer constitutions would result from these elites being captured and manipulated for financial gain,” they said.
India has one of the largest constitutions in the world
A comparison between the two largest democracies in the world (in terms of population) supports Tsebelis and Nardi’s thesis.
The United States Constitution is a model of brevity as it contains only seven articles. In the most recent United Nations Human Development Indicators list, which compiles data from 2019, the United States appeared 17th. Americans were ranked 27th in Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perception Survey.
India, on the other hand, has one of the largest constitutions in the world: the original text, which came into force in 1950, comprised 395 articles. Since then, the number of Articles in the Charter has increased to 448. India was ranked 131st in the 2019 UN Human Development List and 85th in last year’s Transparency International survey.
In an interview with legal news website Courthouse News Service, political scientist Patricio Navia, a professor at New York University, said that the “extremely long text” of Chile’s proposed new constitution “is more of a political platform than a book about what is the rules of the game?
“Constitutions should be short. Long constitutions are like long contracts. Nobody reads them and it becomes necessary to change them many times,” he joked, warning that the new letter’s “long list of social rights” (whose refusal has led to investigations in Chile) entails an “unpayable” bill can.
“Since Latin American countries have had major debt problems in the past, the new constitution is tantamount to forcing a recovering alcoholic (in terms of fiscal discipline) to live in a bar. This won’t end well. Since the constitution is very long, it would become a typical Latin American constitution. Long and ambitious, but not feasible,” warned Navia.