To comply with the demands of EU accession, new member states see themselves compelled to revamp their constitutions, which often implies far-reaching constitutional changes. But political elites choose different strategies of constitutional change. According to Christer Karlsson, reformers can alter the explicit wording of their constitution or its implicit meaning. Their choice of strategy is not only shaped by the rigidity of constitutional amendment procedures and the number of governing parties that need to be brought on board, but also by how politicized the issue at stake actually is. Read the full story in his article “Explaining constitutional change: making sense of cross-national variation among European Union member states”, published in the Journal of European Public Policy.