Constitutional engineering without democratic resilience: Lessons from Thailand's three constitutional projects

Few countries have invested as heavily in constitutional redesign as Thailand, which since the 1990s has adopted three constitutions embodying sharply different philosophies of design: the participatory “People's Constitution” of 1997, the corrective constitution of 2007, and the guardian constitution of 2017. Yet none produced durable democratic resilience. Why has constitutional engineering grounded in such different logics repeatedly generated similar outcomes? Drawing on structured-focused comparison and process tracing, the article argues that constitutional redesign alone is unlikely to create resilient democracy where four conditions persist: entrenched informal institutions, the capture of oversight bodies through autocratic legalism, weak societal ownership, and a mismatch between design and underlying cleavages. Particular attention is paid to the monarchy and the military, whose position above the constitutional order has bounded every Thai charter. The February 2026 referendum on replacing the 2017 charter confirms the argument's relevance for Thailand and for hybrid regimes pursuing constitutional reform.