Franz Xavier Barrios-Suvelza

• University of Erfurt

The 2019 crisis in Bolivia, which led to the resignation of popular left-wing president Evo Morales under paradoxical circumstances and marked the abrupt end of more than a decade of bold social transformation, provides an opportunity to explore key conceptual challenges undertheorized in international studies. The events reveal a political constel...

Zusammenfassung Die These, dass Verfassungsgerichte, Experten und unabhängige Instanzen die Gesellschaft zunehmend regieren, ist umstritten. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es nicht, die mögliche empirische Untermauerung dieser Annahme weiter zu prüfen, sondern zunächst zu untersuchen, was diese unabhängigen Instanzen sind und wohin sie im staatlichen Mak...

In this article, a systematic framework has been developed that identifies the key conceivable formal relationships that form the interface between populism and the constitution. It is concluded that while populist constitutionalism is a dead-end category because populism itself does not respect limitations on power, constitutional populism is poss...

The objective of this article is to introduce a new concept for grouping all countermajoritarian instruments which became the true casualties of polity design during the New Latin American Constitutionalism (NLAC). This theoretical endeavor, which has not been undertaken until now, will be discussed on the basis of the constitutional upheavals that...

The resignation of the Bolivian President Morales in November 2019 has sparked an international polemic over whether a coup d’état took place. This article concludes that the assumption of a coup d’état would be misleading. The problems faced by the Bolivian case stem not only from the lax manner in which scholars have gathered facts, but also from...

Contemporary social science has been interested in highly charged topics such as populism. However, theses discussion have neglected to address the pure methodological challenges that defining such topics can pose. Since debates on populism's definition have been bogged down in discussions of content, this article proposes to explore specific forma...

A raíz de los acontecimientos en Bolivia referidos a la renuncia del Presidente Evo Morales a fines de 2019, se ha desatado una polémica internacional sobre si lo sucedido puede catalogarse como un golpe de Estado. El artículo devela por qué, independientemente de las inclinaciones subjetivas del observador, no cabe calificar lo sucedido en Bolivia...

The 4th edition of the first volume of this work provides an update of the commentary on the preamble and articles 1 to 19 in case law and literature. The structure of the book has been retained and its content supplemented by more recent developments, such as the implications of Europeanisation and digitalisation as well as the Corona pandemic. As...

The unitary–federal dichotomy is used as a standard means for taxonomizing state forms. However, its classificatory power has been increasingly stretched by heterodox cases such as Spain, Italy, South Africa and, most recently, Bolivia. This article contends that Bolivia’s constitutional changes have definitively challenged the long-standing assump...

The unitary–federal dichotomy is used as a standard means for taxonomizing state forms. However, its classificatory power has been increasingly stretched by heterodox cases such as Spain, Italy, South Africa and, most recently, Bolivia. This article contends that Bolivia’s constitutional changes have definitively challenged the long-standing assump...

Tanto críticos como simpatizantes del nuevo constitucionalismo latinoamericano (NCL), que es como algunos han calificado la ola de reformas constitucionales llevadas a cabo en Venezuela, Ecuador y Bolivia entre 1999 y 2009, coinciden en que tales reformas han producido una alteración en los dispositivos de control contramayoritario en dichos países...

Fiscal federalism has offered a template for understanding intergovernmental fiscal relations. Yet when politicians are involved in day-to-day decentralization it may happen that some of the normative elements of fiscal federalism do not fit reality. Substate entities may go beyond the own-source paradigm and have a practical interest in alternativ...

Si bien la cuestión regional en los países andinos ya fue constitucionalizada en Perú y Colombia a fines del siglo pasado, ella ha cobrado relevancia recientemente como parte de reformas constitucionales en Ecuador y Bolivia. La problemática regional en América Latina ha sido parte de la agenda de investigación en relación a temas del desarrollo de...

Resumen Uno de los desafíos que el Nuevo Constitucionalismo Latinoamericano trae, en tanto patrón de cambio constitucional que involucra a Venezuela, Bolivia y el Ecuador, refiere a establecer qué tipo de régimen polí-tico prevalece en dichos países. En este ensayo se indaga esta problemática para el caso boliviano usando un enfoque que enfatiza en...

Comparative federalism has offered a stable theoretical framework for classifying states according to their formal structure. However, in the last decades heterodox constitutional outcomes as in the Spanish, Italian and South African cases have put the conventional taxonomies under pressure, particularly the widely accepted unitary-federal dichotom...

In the framework of devolution, British scholars have inquired how to assess the constitutional position of the local government in the UK and its effect for improving or hindering autonomy and democracy at the local level. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the same topic from a more general and comparative perspective, combining conceptual t...

Scholars have dauntlessly adopted the unitary versus federal antagonism as a frame concept when analyzing decentralization. Nevertheless, this is a confused idea and has to be substituted for a new binomial which allows an accurate understanding of the complex territorial transformations of our time. This essay offers a new conceptual binomial base...

Muchos países latinoamericanos se encuentran reformando sus sistemas de asignación fiscal entre territorios. Este artículo enfoca un aspecto de la plataforma teórica de dichas reformas. Las relaciones fiscales entre niveles territoriales del Estado han sido tratadas descuidando el hecho de que son parte de un sistema más genérico llamado orden terr...

In the last decades Europe has seen changes pertaining to devolution and regional governance that has led to a crisis in the very concept of decentralisation. Using a new interpretation of three selected concepts -autonomy, sub-national statehood and territorial macro-structuration- the territorial reforms in Spain, Italy, Germany, France and Great...

The privatization process in Bolivia, associated with demogoguery and false promises, has been marked by an ausence of transparency and a deficient application. This article argues that the most grotesque errors could have been avoided if there had existed an independent technical administrative court with sufficient hierarchy, capable of identifyi...

Bolivia went through a very important territorial transformation following the approval of the Popular Participation Law in 1994, which led to generalised municipal opening. The benefits of this reform were accompanied by a number of negative effects, such as those regarding the system of State transfers to municipalities. This article proposes a n...

Bolivia went through a very important territorial transformation following the approval of the Popular Participation Law in 1994, which led to generalised municipal opening. The benefits of this reform were accompanied by a number of negative effects, such as those regarding the system of State transfers to municipalities. This article proposes a n...

1. Planteamiento del problema La sociedad boliviana inició en 1994 un intenso proceso de consolidación territorial que desembocó en un modelo de descentralización pro-municipalista 1. Muchos años después se enfrenta la misma sociedad a la necesidad de repensar cómo mejorar este orden territorial debido a las deficiencias que hoy se advierten, si bi...

Este artículo parte de una revisión de los principales institutos discursivos del neoliberalismo boliviano, en permanente referencia a un periodo gubernamental de grandes reformas estatales (1993-1997). Revisa, de manera exploratoria, ciertas variables explicativas de buena parte del retraso institucional y económico del país y se centra en un anál...