This article engages liberal-democratic constitutionalism by focusing on its fundamental characters and definitions; the implications of populism and illiberal turns will be investigated as well, especially in the second part of the essay. The first section of this paper addresses the critical and interpretative paradigms of contemporary constitutional theory, by illustrating the dichotomy between dualist and monist understandings of democracy. Conversely, the second section addresses the relationship between populism and constitutionalism to illustrate the paradigm of the so-called populist constitutionalism as an illiberal form of constitutional democracy