Between Democratic Security and Democratic Legality: Discursive Institutionalism and Colombia’s Constitutional Court by JAN BOESTEN B.A. (Hons), University of Calgary, 2007 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 2009 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Doctor of Philosophy in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Political Science) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) February 2016 © Jan Boesten, 2016 Abstract This dissertation seeks to explain why the Colombian Constitutional Court disallowed a referendum to extend presidential terms in 2010, when it allowed a similar reform in 2005. There are three elements to this decision that make it remarkable for institutional theory and comparative politics: 1) The sitting president, Álvaro Uribe, was an extremely popular and powerful president, who used his transformative capacities to initiate a far- reaching reform agenda; 2) the Court’s authority appreciably increased between 2005 and 2010; 3) the jurisprudence of the Court involved a doctrine that is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, but a re-interpretation of the norms outlining judicial review of constitutional reforms. This dissertation inserts the 2010 decision in the historical and political context and asks three questions that guide each chapter: 1) Does the 1991 Constitution amount to a critical juncture in Colombia’s political history? 2) Does the post-genesis evolution of Colombia’s constitutional jurisprudence follow a path-dependent logic? 3) Did judges follow strategic incentives when they developed and applied the substitution doctrine, which struck down Uribe’s reform to extent the number of terms in the presidential office? Building on the Colliers’ critical juncture framework, I show that the 1991 constituent process was a contingent event marked by genuine communicative action that incorporated sections from society previously marginalized, negotiated with important public input, and entirely restructured the meaning of the organizational imperatives of the polity. Contrary to expectations from the discontinuous change model, post-genesis development cannot be fully captured by path dependence, but involves incremental changes of institutional learning inside the judiciary. The investigation into the re- election decisions will show that institutional learning depends on carefully administered spaces of deliberation inside the Court that buttress the cohesion of legal reasoning. Altogether, this leads me to view institutions not as structured expectations in a game between rational actors or regularized patterns of conducts, but discursive structures, in which actors negotiate the meaning and significance of norms with reference to a constitutional text and the intention of the constituents that drafted the charter in the first place. The constitutional judge is a deliberative judge. ii Preface This dissertation is original, unpublished, individual work by Jan Boesten. UBC Ethics Certificate number H12-00631 covered the fieldwork and conduction of elite interviews in the course of the research. iii Table of Contents ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................................................ii PREFACE......................................................................................................................................................iii TABLE OF CONTENTS..............................................................................................................................iv LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................................................vii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................................viii LIST OF GRAPHS .......................................................................................................................................ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...........................................................................................................................x DEDICATION..............................................................................................................................................xii 1. INTRODUCTION: ETHICAL DISCOURSE IN DELEGATIVE DEMOCRACIES....................1 1.1. DEMOCRATIC LEGALITY TRIUMPHS OVER DEMOCRATIC SECURITY.................................................1 1.1.1. Legislative Act 02 of 2004 “by which some articles of the Constitution are reformed and other dispositions are introduced” (C-1040/05)....................................................................................3 1.1.2. Review of constitutionality of law “by which to convey a referendum and submit a constitutional reform to the people” (C-141/10)....................................................................................6 1.1.3. The question of judicial power in Colombia..........................................................................10 1.2. THE PECULIAR CASE OF ÁLVARO URIBE.........................................................................................12 1.3. THE PRIMACY OF DEMOCRATIC LEGALITY OVER DEMOCRATIC SECURITY AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR DISCURSIVE INSTITUTIONALISM ..........................................................................................................23 1.4. CASE SELECTION AND DATA COLLECTION ......................................................................................29 1.5. STRUCTURE OF THE ANALYSIS........................................................................................................36 2. THE NOVELTY OF THE 1991 CONSTITUTION: A CRITICAL JUNCTURE IN COLOMBIA’S HISTORY. .........................................................................................................................38 2.1. INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................................38 2.2. CRITICAL JUNCTURES AND THE STUDY OF COLOMBIA’S HISTORY ..................................................41 2.3. IDENTIFYING A BASE LINE: VIOLENCE, PARTIES, AND THE STRUCTURATION OF A FRAGILE STATE..45 2.4. THE INTERREGNA OF GEN. RAFAEL REYES AND GEN. GUSTAVO ROJAS PINILLA: CONSOCIATIONALISM AND INSTITUTION BUILDING UNDER MILITARY TUTELAGE ......................................58 2.4.1. Cleavages and crisis: the political origin of the Thousand-Day-War and La Violencia ......60 2.4.2. Political junctures: institutional engineering under and after General Rafael Reyes and the National Front pact ..............................................................................................................................65 2.4.3. Consociationalism and its discontent: political stability at the cost of democratic quality..69 2.4.4. Pacted democracy in Colombia: building institutions shielded from public pressure..........75 2.5. THE 1991 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY: STUDENTS MOVEMENTS AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PUBLIC REASON..........................................................................................................................................76 2.5.1. The aftermath of National Front: hyper-fragmentation of a regime in crisis .......................78 2.5.2. The extra-institutional path: the communicative action in the student movement ................82 2.5.3. The institutional path: breaking the Conservative-Liberal hegemony ..................................86 2.5.4. Institutional novelties of the 1991 Constitution.....................................................................90 2.5.5. Normative changes: interpreting rights.................................................................................94 2.5.6. The 1991 political juncture: the atomization of the nation ...................................................98 2.6. CONCLUSION: THE 1991 CONSTITUTION AS A CRITICAL JUNCTURE IN COLOMBIA’S HISTORY......107 3. THE CHOQUE DE TRENES BETWEEN COLOMBIA’S HIGH COURTS: PATH DEPENDENCE AND LEGAL ARGUMENTATION............................................................................111 3.1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................111 iv 3.2. PART I: PATH DEPENDENCE AND COLOMBIA’S NEW INSTITUTIONS. .............................................116 3.2.1. Courts and the new constitutional regime: selection, jurisdiction, and interdependence of branches of government .....................................................................................................................122 3.2.2. The choque de trenes and Nuevo Derecho ..........................................................................128 3.2.3. “Via de Hecho“: legal vs. constitutional certainty .............................................................132 3.3. PART II: SETTING AN IRREVERSIBLE PRECEDENT? THE PROCESO 8000 AND THE INVIOLABILITY OF THE VOTE IN CONGRESS. ..........................................................................................................................137 3.3.1. Surviving without governing – Samper’s strategy and the increasing atomization of the party system ........................................................................................................................................139 3.3.2. The normative issues – illicit enrichment and the inviolability of parliamentary votes......146