We investigate properties of the $m$-th error of approximation by polynomials with constant coefficients $\mathcal{D}_{m}(x)$ and with modulus-constant coefficients $\mathcal{D}_{m}^{\ast}(x)$ introduced by Bern�� and Blasco (2016) to study greedy bases in Banach spaces. We characterize when $\liminf_{m}{\mathcal{D}_{m}(x)}$ and $\liminf_{m}{\mathcal{D}_{m}^*(x)}$ are equivalent to $\| x\|$ in terms of the democracy and superdemocracy functions, and provide sufficient conditions ensuring that $\lim_{m}{\mathcal{D}_{m}^*(x)} = \lim_{m}{\mathcal{D}_{m}(x)} = \| x\|$, extending previous very particular results.