Why Have There Been So Many Amendments?

By 26 January 2024, when the Constitution completed 74 years, it had already been amended 106 times. Given how demanding the amendment procedure is, that number can look surprisingly high. The chapter examines this through two graphs — one showing how many amendments were made in each decade, and one showing how many years it took for every batch of ten amendments — and finds that, apart from the very first decade, every decade has seen a fairly steady stream of amendments, regardless of which party or coalition was in power. To understand why, the amendments can be grouped by what kind of change they actually made, and by what triggered them — differing interpretations between …