Constitutionalism is the principle that government power should be structured and limited by a foundational legal document — a constitution — that is harder to change than ordinary law. The constitution defines the organs of government, distributes power among them, and specifies the rights that government may not violate. Ordinary legislation must conform to the constitution; if it doesn’t, it can be struck down through judicial review.
Constitutions do two things that are in tension. They empower — by creating institutions and authorizing them to act. And they constrain — by setting limits on what those institutions may do. The balance between empowerment and constraint varies: some constitutions grant broad emergency powers; others enumerate rights so specific that they restrict government action even in crisis. The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights operates primarily as constraint; the preamble to the French Constitution of 1958 operates primarily as empowerment, defining the republic’s values and mission.
The sociological interest in constitutionalism is not whether constitutions achieve what they promise but what they produce as social facts. A constitution creates a shared vocabulary for political argument — claims about government action are expressed as constitutional claims, and the boundaries of acceptable politics are set by what the constitution permits. This framing effect operates regardless of whether the constitution is enforced consistently. Even under authoritarian regimes that ignore constitutional limits in practice, the existence of a constitution shapes political discourse by defining what the regime must pretend to respect.
Constitutionalism also raises the counter-majoritarian problem: if the constitution constrains democratic majorities, who has the authority to interpret those constraints? In most constitutional systems, the answer is judges — appointed officials who are not electorally accountable. This means that constitutional government is always partly government by judiciary, and the politics of judicial appointment is a politics of constitutional meaning.
Related terms
- Judicial review — the mechanism that enforces constitutional limits
- Sovereignty — the authority that constitutions claim to constitute and constrain
- Rule of law — the principle that constitutionalism institutionalizes
- Rights — the claims that constitutions entrench against ordinary politics
- Codification — the broader project of organizing law into authoritative texts