ABSTRACT
Constitutions are important in liberal democracies. They lay down the ground rules about how political power is attained and how it can be exercised, about what governments can and cannot do, and they also set out rights of the citizens. Every country’s constitution contains both a written and an unwritten component. That is, there are aspects of a country’s political system that, perhaps through precedent and convention, have acquired the status of firm rules, even though they are not explicitly contained in the document called ‘The Constitution’. For this reason, we cannot expect to get a full picture of the way in which a country’s politics operates just by studying its written constitution. Constitutions might not explicitly acknowledge the existence of central features of modern politics, such as large and disciplined political parties. In this chapter we shall not examine those features of the constitution that regulate, for example, relations between government and parliament, or the rules governing the election of parliament – these are covered in other chapters – but will concentrate on the evolution of the constitution. Having examined its origins, we will outline the record of amendment, discuss the role of the judiciary in interpreting and developing the constitution, and consider whether further amendment would be desirable.
