  An effective model with constituent quarks as fundamental degrees of freedom
is used to predict the relative strangeness production pattern in both high
energy elementary and heavy ion collisions. The basic picture is that of the
statistical hadronization model, with hadronizing color-singlet clusters
assumed to be at full chemical equilibrium at constituent quark level. Thus, by
assuming that at least the ratio between strange and non-strange constituent
quarks survives in the final hadrons, the apparent undersaturation of strange
particle phase space observed in the data can be accounted for. In this
framework, the enhancement of relative strangeness production in heavy ion
collisions in comparison with elementary collisions is mainly owing to the
excess of initial non-strange matter over antimatter and the so-called
canonical suppression, namely the constraint of exact color and flavor
conservation over small volumes.
