It is always a pleasure, and revealing, to read a generous but careful review of one’s work, and we thank Javier Corrales for his comments. Our books are ostensibly about different things—presidential powers in his case, the conformation of the system of constitutional justice in ours. But it is obvious that these books are in conversation. Corrales correctly identifies the central point of agreement between our two books, and it is sufficiently important that it is worth highlighting again: The power politics of the originating moment are central to the design of the resulting constitutional text. Blass and I and Corrales agree on this point, as does much of the emerging literature on the politics of constitutional design. Moreover, we all give the domestic distributive consequences of constitutional design pride of place in the strategic calculus of the designers.
Corrales identifies one point of possible divergence between our findings, which we believe is more apparent than real. He finds no effect of designers’ ideology on the resulting powers of the president. In contrast, we find that the Left and the Right differ when it comes time to entrust their respective projects to the sphere of constitutional justice. But this surface difference hides considerable agreement. Contrary to claims that the Right wants independence (to protect property rights) while the Left wants weak courts, we find that both the Right and the Left want judicial protection when they are weak, and want a compliant judicial ally when they are strong. They both want more freedom to govern unfettered by constitutional constraints, and they both want countermajoritarian constraints when in the minority. This finding aligns well with Corrales’s finding that Right and Left want strong presidents when they are in power, and oppose them when their rivals are in power. Ideology does not appear to influence preferences for the allocation of power across the branches.
Our finding that the Left has a more robust statist project, and thus has more to constitutionalize when it feels threatened, is simply an extension of the strategic model that animates Corrales’s argument as well as ours. In other words, we both believe that the Left and the Right are equally self-interested and strategic, but our dependent variable has a substantive programmatic component (scope of authority) that is driven by ideology, while his does not.
Corrales correctly notes that the Bolivian and Argentine case studies in our book are not marked by dramatically different outcomes, in terms of the two courts’ scope of authority. Comparing Colombia and Chile, as he suggests, would (and does) offer a sharper contrast. But focusing on Bolivia helps us make the larger point that for all the claims that the 2009 Bolivian model is a radical departure from classical constitutionalism, it responds to the same power dynamics as the other constitutions. And though some complained that it was unilaterally dictated by the party in power, the final text was ultimately the result of a negotiation that tempered that unilateralism. The relatively greater strength of the ruling party in Bolivia translates to noticeable but not dramatic differences in the court’s formal autonomy; but the two constitutional moments in Bolivia—one unilateral, the other negotiated—also give us within-case variation that helps make our argument. Corrales may be right that we would have been better served by a focus on clearly contrasting examples in the main case studies, but our hope is that the inclusion of a variety of minicases beyond the three in-depth studies allays this concern.
Strategic accounts of constitutional design, like ours and Corrales’s, can seem so intuitive that it is easy to lose sight of the rival hypotheses. Constitutions are not always presented this way. They are at times venerated as the result of selfless statesmanship, the purest expression of wisdom and caution, devoid of self-interest. Other times they are denigrated as cheap partisan pamphlets scarcely worth the paper they are printed on, or as the product of mindless copying of international fads and fashions. But this account of Global South constitutionalism as either high-minded statecraft or mindless posturing and copying is belied by the many points of agreement in the emerging work on the political origins of constitutions, including Corrales’s book and ours. More work certainly remains to be done on the extent to which both ideals and international influences factor into the alchemy of constitutional design. But constitutions, we are finding, are the product of careful planning, strategic calculation, and domestic power dynamics, for all that they may not achieve their designers’ intentions.
