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Few states in the modern world have constitutional arrangements that are more than a century old. Indeed, the vast majority of all the world’s states have constitutions written in the 20th century. This is true of states such as Germany, Italy, and Japan that were defeated in World War II and of other states, such as the successor states of the Soviet Union, Spain, and China, that have experienced civil war and revolutions in the course of the century. Great Britain and the United States are almost alone among major contemporary nation-states in possessing constitutional arrangements that predate the 20th century.

The prestige of constitutional democracy was once so great that many thought all the countries of the world would eventually accede to the examples of the United States or Great Britain and establish similar arrangements. However, the collapse of the Weimar Constitu­tion in Germany in the 1930s and the recurrent political crises of the Fourth Republic in France after World War II suggested that constitu­tional democracy carries no guarantee of stability. The failure of both presidential and parliamentary systems to work as expected in less-advanced countries that modelled their constitutions on those of the United States and Britain resulted in a further diminution in the pres­tige of both systems. Functioning examples are located throughout the world, though these are generally poorly institutionalized outside of those countries with direct historical ties to Western Europe. Japan is a notable exception to this generalization, as are Costa Rica, India, and several other states to a lesser degree.

Curious enough that even in Britain and the United States, the 20th century has seen much change in the governmental system. In the United States, for example, the relationship of legislature and ex­ecutive at both the national and the state levels has been significantly altered by the growth of bureaucracies and the enlargement of the ex­ecutive’s budgetary powers. In Britain, even far more reaching chang­es have occurred in the relationship between the prime minister and Parliament and in Parliament’s role in supervising the executive es­tablishment. In both countries, the appearance of the welfare state, the impact of modern technology on the economy, and international crises have resulted in major alterations in the ways in which the insti­tutions of government function and interact.

The adoption of new constitutions is also a major aspect of polit­ical change in almost all of the states of Eastern Europe. All sys­tems, moreover, even without formal constitutional change, undergo a continual process of adjustment and mutation as their institutional arrangements respond to and reflect changes in the social order and the balance of political forces.