Acceso usuarios
Santarém (Marvila), Portugal
In this article António Manique has considered the reasons for the success of the Constitutional Charter, first promulgated in Portugal in 1826 as a liberal constitution. This remained in force, with some brief interruptions due to civil war and revolution, and with a few formal amendments, down to the fall of the monarchy in 1910. He shows how its longevity was achieved by incremental modifications in the formal content, and perhaps more importantly in political practices, which modified the conservative prescriptions of the original Charter, with a strong royal executive, a Chamber of Peers nominated by the crown and a Chamber of Deputies, indirectly elected on a restricted franchise, into a version consistent with the constitutional norms of nineteenth-century liberal societies. The central process was one in which the Chamber of Deputies asserted rights of supervision over the executive power and established its primacy over the Chamber of Peers, while confining the monarch to a restricted arbitral role in the Constitution.
