In both Poland and Hungary new constitutions were adopted after elections that provided a new government with the formal capacity to control the process by excluding opposition interests. However, whereas in Poland the constitution was in the end the result of a compromise among a plurality of political interests, in Hungary the government unilaterally imposed the constitution with negative consequences for the future of democracy in the country. In this chapter, we argue that a more consensual constitution-making process was possible in Poland because opposition forces, in spite of their meager results in terms of parliamentary representation, were able to exert influence over the process through extra-institutional and institutional means. In contrast to Hungary, where opposition groups were extremely weak or discredited, in Poland extra-parliamentary opposition maintained significant support among voters and functioned as an effective political constraint on dominant parties. Thanks to their strength outside formal political institutions, opposition forces in Poland were able to induce incumbents to make changes in the constitution-making procedures that allowed them to have some clout in the drafting of the constitution.

Although many contemporary democracies face popular pressures to profoundly transform or replace their constitutions, there is little systematic academic discussion on the legal and political challenges that these events pose to democratic principles and practices. This book is a collaborative effort by legal scholars and political scientists to analyze these challenges from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. This introductory chapter discusses the phenomenon of constitutional redrafting in democratic regimes around the world and the contributions each chapter in the book makes to an understanding of the factors leading to the adoption of new constitutions in the context of free and fair elections, the procedural and political features of these episodes, and the relationship between constitutional replacements in democratic regimes, democratic theory, and democratization.