Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
informal environment and deriving profit from it. And, many
groups in civil society have also responded more to clientelist
modes of politics than to more participatory, democratic ones.
The Evolution of Constitutional Doctrine
Liberal ideas did not penetrate deeply into the country in
the nineteenth century. Constitutions and formal legal institutions
were often either ignored or given ex post facto rationalizations;
such documents and institutions kept liberal doctrines
alive but at the cost of hypocrisy and cynicism. The Dominican
Republic appears to fit the general pattern in Latin America in
that the number of constitutions correlates inversely with a
country's democratic experience. Having had practically no
democratic history until well into the second half of the twentieth
century, the country has, nevertheless, experienced a substantial
number of new constitutions and other modifications.
As was the case in other authoritarian countries, in the Dominican
Republic the adoption of a new constitution, especially in
the late nineteenth century, often reflected an authoritarian
leader's effort to legitimize or extend his rule. This pattern was
to continue well into the twentieth century. However, at times,
as elsewhere on the continent, new constitutions in the Dominican
Republic also were generated during democratic "turning
points," although these tended to be short-lived. Thus, for
nearly all of Dominican history, unconstitutional regimes have
used constitutionalism to augment their claims to legitimacy
rather than employing them to establish general "rules of the
game" to which they or other major power holders in the society
would commit themselves. At the same time, reformers and
democratic leaders sought to generate liberal constitutional
texts and to live by them.
The country's first constitution in 1844 was a remarkably liberal
document. It was influenced directly by the Haitian constitution
of 1843 and indirectly by the United States Constitution
of 1789, the liberal 1812 Cadiz Constitution of Spain, and the
French constitutions of 1799 and 1804. Because of these influences,
the 1844 constitution called for presidentialism, separation
of powers, and extensive "checks and balances." But its
liberal nature was to be short-lived. General Pedro Santana,
claiming that the legislative restrictions on the executive were
excessive in a period of war, forced the Constitutional Assembly
to add an article granting the president extraordinary powers.
Also, although the constitution did not permit immediate pres-
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