The Symbolic Function of the Constitution in Contemporary Authoritarian Systems

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Associate Professor of Public Law, Department of International Law, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran .

10.22091/cpl.2026.15694.1114

Abstract

In recent decades, along with the spread of new forms of authoritarianism, a phenomenon has emerged in constitutional law, namely that some systems acknowledge the constitution, elections, separation of powers, and fundamental rights of citizens at the text level, but in practice, they weaken the rule of law and render power uncontrollable. The main issue of the present study is how the constitution can reproduce legalism in contemporary authoritarianism without leading to the rule of law, and through what institutional and interpretive paths is this gap established? The aim of the present article is to analytically formulate the concept of symbolic law and explain the role of the constitution in legitimizing, managing protests, and normalizing the concentration of power in authoritarian systems. The research method is a conceptual-normative analysis combined with a qualitative comparative study and a focus on common institutional mechanisms such as the engineering of regulatory institutions, expedient interpretation of the constitution, selective judicial control, and dense legislation. The research findings show that in authoritarian systems, the constitution often changes function from a limitation of power to a source of display of order. This reduces the political costs of exercising power, first, by producing a legal language of legitimacy; second, by designing institutions that have the appearance of supervision, it transforms real supervision into formal supervision; and third, by selectively activating rights and freedoms, it reduces predictability and equality before the law to political privilege. The result is that understanding contemporary authoritarianism without analyzing the symbolic function of the constitution is incomplete, and reconstructing the rule of law requires a careful separation of formal legalism from the rule of law and the provision of specific criteria for measuring the gap between norm and reality.

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References

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