Tofigh Maboudi

Climate change litigants have been increasingly deploying existing legal and constitutional structures, and particularly the rights to life and a healthy environment, prompting judiciaries around the world to confront issues of climate change in their interpretation of these constitutional rights. Do these constitutional rights have any positive impact on climate litigation? To what extent do the rights to life and to a healthy environment enhance climate justice by increasing more successful climate litigation? Using an original data set of 1,855 litigation cases from 1992 to 2021, we find robust empirical evidence that while stock of climate laws and the constitutional right to a healthy environment do not have any impact on the outcome of climate lawsuits, the right to life can enhance the success rate of these lawsuits. We argue that climate litigation has extended the scope of the right to life—certainly beyond what John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and other theorists of natural rights envisioned—to include environmental and climate rights and successfully claim that governments’ climate inactions (in lowering greenhouse gas emissions, for example) pose serious threat towards people’s right to life.

Does the process of writing a constitution have any impact on its durability? Using a cross-national analysis of 209 constitutions adopted since 1974, this study shows that the broader inclusion of different societal and political groups in constitution-making processes, rather than mere public participation, positively correlates with constitutional durability. Following self-enforcement theories, this study argues that to be self-enforcing and enduring, a constitution should be viewed as “fair” by every group in society to create a supporting constituency. This study suggests that an inclusive process can result in a “fair” constitution, which is deemed beneficial to every group in society and garners their willingness to defend and support the terms of the constitution. Confirming this argument, our statistical analysis shows that inclusive constitutions have 54 percent lower risk of replacement than noninclusive constitutions.

Laws aimed at tackling climate change problems have grown significantly in the last two decades. Following this global trend and under pressure from international institutions and lenders, both rich, oil exporting (i.e., major greenhouse gas [GHG] emitters) and poor, non‐oil rich (i.e., mostly vulnerable nations with lower shares of emission) states in the Middle East and North Africa have hastened to adopt new laws and regulations to mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. The question remains, however, does the adoption of these laws have any measurable impact on these nations' climate change performance? That is, to what degree do these laws have an impact on greenhouse gas emissions or adaptation capacity and readiness? Utilizing a panel data of 660 country‐year observations (22 countries over 30 years), our cross‐national statistical analysis shows that while climate change laws seem to have an impact on GHG emissions, they have so far failed to boost these nations' adaptation capacity. Our case study shows that oil politics and basic development objectives seem to be the key to this failure.

Since the third wave of democracy, term limits have become a popular fixture of most constitutions intended to constrain the executive. Yet, recent constitutional reforms around the world show that presidents seeking re-election sometimes overturn the entire constitutional order to extend their power. What is the impact of these constitutional manipulations on the longevity of the executive in office? Using survival analysis of all political leaders and national constitutions from 1875 to 2015, this article demonstrates, for the first time, that when ‘authoritarian-aspiring’ presidents remove constitutional term limits, they increase their stay in office by more than 40%. Our findings contrast with a widely held position in the comparative authoritarian literature suggesting that dictators survive longer under institutional constraints. On the contrary, we argue that by removing constitutional barriers, rulers consolidate more power at the expense of their most ambitious allies and can stay in power longer.

Does public participation in constitution-making processes enhance constitutional legitimacy? Using an original public opinion survey conducted in Tunisia shortly after the adoption of the 2014 Constitution, this article examines whether public participation in constitution-making activities enhances perceived constitutional legitimacy. The results show that participants are more likely to support the constitution and its institutions than non-participants. We argue that participation increases constitutional literacy among the general public and this increased knowledge impacts the respondents’ perception of the constitution. The empirical findings confirm normative assumptions of participatory model of the democratic theory and suggest that inclusive and participatory constitutional reform processes, in contrast to an elitist approach, are more likely to yield democratic constitutional outcomes which are supported by larger segments of the society.

The Tunisian constitutional reform experience in the wake of the Arab Spring—through which citizens were able to meet with their representatives, participate in public deliberation over the constitution, and offer their own proposals for the constitution—offers a unique opportunity to evaluate the debate on the optimal modality of constitutional processes by revisiting both deliberative and representative theories of democracy and their predictions on how the process can improve constitutional outcomes. The statistical analysis of a dataset of more than 2,500 citizen proposals and the content of three constitutional drafts shows that 43 percent of public proposals were included in the final draft of the constitution. The results also demonstrate that public input related to rights and freedoms is more likely to be reflected in the constitution compared to other public proposals. This article suggests that more inclusive processes can lead to more democratic constitutional outcomes, although this impact is contingent upon the incorporation of particular consensus-building institutions.

Using an original data set assessing the effect of the 195 new constitutions worldwide over the past 40 years on levels of democracy, this article argues that when popular participation and group inclusion are both considered, inclusion is what matters. After showing that group inclusion generates more improvements in levels of democracy than mere participation in our data set of implemented constitutions, we address some of the prominent cases of constitution-writing failure that occur when individual participation is valued more highly than group inclusion. The article shows that even after unprecedented waves of popular participation through social media feedback (Egypt and Iceland) and focus groups and workshops (Chile), participation alone cannot generate constitutions that improve levels of democracy, or, sometimes, even the very promulgation of new constitutions. Indeed, using these cases as illustrations, we show how participation without inclusion is doomed to failure. We then show that high inclusion cases, even if they involve low participation (such as Tunisia 2014 and Colombia 1991), do generate democracy improvements.

The unprecedented wave of constitutional reforms in North Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring provides a unique opportunity to study the evolution of the foreign policy content of constitutions in different political contexts. Using a cross-national statistical analysis of 195 national constitutions promulgated from 1974 to 2015, as well as an in-depth analysis of North African constitutional reforms from 2011 to 2016, this study finds that compared to dictatorships, democracies allocate less power to the executive in the realm of foreign policy. A comparison of the revised North African constitutions with their pre-Arab Spring predecessors also shows that while the foreign policy content of the Algerian and Moroccan constitutions did not change significantly, constitutional provisions in Tunisia and Egypt successfully limited executive power regarding foreign affairs.