How are law and politics re-configured by the constitutional transformations in Bolivia and Ecuador? A systems-theoretical analysis

• Applicants: Dr.-Ing. Franz Xavier Barrios Suvelza; Professor Dr. André Brodocz
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539440488

Since the 2000s, constitutional transformations have been taking place in Bolivia and Ecuador, characterized in particular by three mayor innovations: the constitutionalization of plurinationality, the overemphasis of the people, and the legal subjectification of nature. This constitutional transformation has implications for the relationship between law and politics that many see as so significant that they speak of a “New Latin American Constitutionalism”. How this change in law and politics can be precisely reconstructed and analyzed, however, remains an open question. This is where the project comes in, with a systems-theoretical perspective oriented toward Niklas Luhmann. This perspective makes it possible to analyze the effects of constitutional transformations of the legal system and the political system at three levels: At the level of systemic stabilizations, it will be examined whether and, if so, how constitutions contribute to the differentiation of these two systems through structural coupling and de-paradoxing; at the level of systemic self-descriptions, it will be examined whether and, if so, how this change is described and reflected in semantics such as the "New Latin American Constitutionalism" or the “Estado de Derechos” (State of Rights); and at the level of system differentiation, the interplay of the operative processing of law and politics (at the first level) and the semantics (at the second level) can then be used to draw more precise conclusions about the form and degree of functional differentiation of the political system and the legal system. Thus, it will be shown how the constitutional transformations in Bolivia and Ecuador reconfigure the relationship between law and politics, i.e., whether and how law and politics differentiate, structurally couple and de-paradox under these conditions, as well as what function(s) the constitution has in law, on the one hand, and politics, on the other, as a result.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants