Cambridge Comparative Constitutional Law Discussion Group: Benjamín Alemparte (University of Chile)

Speaker: Benjamín Alemparte (University of Chile)

Amid contemporary debates on democratic backsliding and neoliberal reform lies a distinct constitutional phenomenon that has not yet been adequately theorized: deregulation as a mode of constitutional politics. This Article introduces the concept of deregulatory constitutionalism to describe executive-led projects that use ordinary legal instruments, decrees, delegations, administrative restructuring, and regulatory review, to reconfigure constitutional orders from within. Rather than signaling a withdrawal of the state, these projects redeploy legality to reorganize the political economy of governance, centralize executive authority, and insulate key domains of decision-making from majoritarian contestation. Drawing on a comparative analysis of the United States under Trump, Argentina under Milei, and contemporary developments in Chile, the Article identifies a recurrent constitutional pattern across divergent regimes. Despite differences in institutional form and political context, these cases exhibit recurring similarities: executive centralization, reliance on unilateral lawmaking, rhetoric of emergency or exception, and institutional consolidation in directive offices. Crucially, these transformations are not distributionally neutral. Deregulatory reforms systematically reallocate public power in ways that advantage dominant private economic actors aligned with governing coalitions, while narrowing the state's redistributive and mediating capacities.

The central paradox is consistent across contexts: programs framed as reducing the state generate new legal architectures and expanded executive control. By reframing deregulation as a process of informal constitutional change rather than technocratic adjustment, this Article challenges prevailing accounts of both the regulatory state and democratic erosion. Deregulation does not mark the retreat of law, but its constitutional redeployment. What appears as institutional subtraction is, in structural terms, a program of constitutional re-foundation—one that transforms the relationship between state, market, and democracy without formal constitutional rupture.

The Cambridge Comparative Constitutional Law Reading Group was set up by a group of PhD students working in comparative constitutional law and public law more broadly. The reading group aims to be an informal forum where graduate students in Cambridge can gather to read works in comparative constitutional law and share their research ideas.

Cambridge Comparative Constitutional Law Reading Group Convenors: Even Y. Chao, Zheng Hong See, Rashidah Abdul Hamid, Raja Dandamudi, Jaideep Singh Lalli