Populism and Constituent Power

Abstract Why do populists bother with redesigning formal constitutions once they have abolished prior ‘flawed’ or oligarchic ones? Why do populist executives focus on constitutional transformation even with respect to their own, enacted constitutions? I argue that the populist leader’s claim to embody the constituent power, purporting to return to the people the popular sovereignty wrongly usurped by the ‘establishment’, involves a project of regime change from constitutional democracy towards increasingly authoritarian hybrid forms expanding unchecked executive power. While the dynamics of this process are specific to each country, the political logic behind populist obsession with the constituent power and constitutional transformation is evident everywhere. The constitutional changes they introduce typically undermine both constitutionalism and democracy.