Transforming Politics into Constitutions: The Politics of Constitution-Making in Latin America.

This paper focuses on the question of whether the process of constitution-making merits consideration as an independent explanatory variable and proposes a framework for analyzing it. It understands constitution-making as consisting of three separate and recognizable phases: 1) Pre-constituent (or preparatory) phase; 2) the constituent (or decision-making) phase; and the 3) post-constituent (or implementation) phase. It conceives constitution-making as a series of interlocking processes which are sequentially connected via a series of mechanisms with each partial process having an impact on the subsequent phase, and examines the key issues in each stage. The argument places particular emphasis on coalitional politics, and claims that constitutions should be understood as the complex and often unexpected outcome of bargaining among political coalitions, the product of multiple designers with diverse values, beliefs and interests, cross cutting each other in multiple attempts at partial design. The paper uses the Andean cases as empirical bases for its conceptual framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]