La materia elettorale nello Stato costituzionale europeo: una prospettiva comparata

This article offers a comparative survey of the status of the electoral law and its reform across legal orders belonging to the type of the European constitutional state, proceeding from the common legal space defined by the founding values of the European Union and the guarantees of the ECHR. The analysis is structured around three main lines of inquiry. The first one concerns constitutional constraints: the author examines the distribution of constitutional provisions on proportional representation in the EU member states and a few well-established Western European democracies, showing that the constitutional entrenchment of such principles may leave broad margins of discretion for the legislature, as confirmed by the case law of the Austrian Verfassungsgerichtshof and the Spanish Tribunal Constitucional. The second line of inquiry concerns procedural aspects: the article discusses the rarity of special deliberative quorums for the electoral law and the tensions between the need for regulatory stability and majority-driven reform practices. The third one concerns the timing of reforms and the Venice Commission’s Code of Good Practice as a soft law instrument.