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Constitution
About: Constitution is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 37828 publications have been published within this topic receiving 435603 citations.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined 59 initiatives of legislation addressing federal matters voted by the Chamber of Deputies from 1989 to 2006 and explored how political institutions affect the decision-making process of federal issues, by distinguishing main actors' preferences from federal institutions, controlled by presidential terms.
Abstract: The article shows that the drafters of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution approved political institutions that combine broad jurisdictional authority to the Federal government along with limited institutional veto powers to subnational governments. The study has examined 59 initiatives of legislation addressing federal matters voted by the Chamber of Deputies from 1989 to 2006. The article explores how political institutions affect the decision-making process of federal issues, by distinguishing main actors´ preferences from federal institutions, controlled by presidential terms.
65 citations
65 citations
TL;DR: This bicentennial year has revived an old vision of the meaning of American constitutional history as discussed by the authors, a vision of a polity defined by the perspicacity of the framers of the United States Constitution, those powerful and brilliant men who in 1787 imposed their vision on us.
Abstract: This bicentennial year has revived an old vision of the meaning of American constitutional history. Our significance as a people and as a nation, we are told, derives from the perspicacity of our Framers, those powerful and brilliant men who in 1787 imposed their vision of a polity on us. They made us what we are because they drafted a text, which became the United States Constitution. Because of them, "we find ourselves," as the young Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1838, "under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. . . . Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights." If theirs was the task of creation, ours (and here the first person plural includes all Americans since the Framers) is conservation. To quote Lincoln again, "We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors." And thus, it remains to us to "transmit" our inheritance "undecayed by the lapse of time, and untorn by usurpation to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know," a task we assume because of "gratitude to our fathers," as well as "justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general."1 It is hard to imagine a clearer or more eloquent statement of important features of the celebratory mainstream perspective against which the essays in this symposium were written. To Lincoln, the drafting of the 1787 federal Constitution was the pivotal event in our national history, the event that constituted our national identity. Lincoln regarded the constitutional text as a closed repository of permanent constitutional meaning. This symposium describes some of the intense struggles
65 citations
TL;DR: Sweden's self-narrative is that of an outward-looking internationalist state whose commitments to justice and equality are not confined to co-nationals as discussed by the authors, which distinguishes Swedish internationalism.
Abstract: Sweden’s self-narrative is that of an outward-looking internationalist state whose commitments to justice and equality are not confined to co-nationals. What distinguishes Swedish internationalism,...
64 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: A study of the events surrounding the uprising in the North and the measures which restored peace (and those which will maintain it) is the result of collaboration between the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Mali made its transition to democracy in 1991-1992 after the overthrow of Moussa Traore's 23-year-old military dictatorship on 26 March 1991. A process of military and civilian collaboration fostered national reconciliation, leading to a referendum for a new constitution and elections which brought to power Mali’s first democratically elected President, Government, and Legislature. A process of peacemaking between the Government of Mali and the rebel movements in the northern part of the country successfully prevented the outbreak of civil war and presents useful lessons for the international community in preventive diplomacy. After six years of unrest, nearly 3,000 rebels agreed to a process of cantonment and reintegration at the end of 1995, building the trust necessary for some 10,000 more to come forward in the following years and exchange their weapons for the means to readapt themselves to civilian life. This study of the events surrounding the uprising in the North and the measures which restored peace (and those which will maintain it) is the result of collaboration between the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).
64 citations