Economic Effects of Post-Socialist Constitutions 25 Years from the Outset of Transition

Post‐socialist constitutions: The de jure–de facto gap, its effects and determinantsa

“…The empirical results of Metelska‐Szaniawska (2016) indicate that three aspects of the post‐socialist constitutional framework were particularly relevant for the effective functioning of the commitment mechanism and, therefore, conducive to reforming the economies throughout the transition period: de facto constitutional court independence, de facto protection of constitutional rights and freedoms, as well as, in the case of some groups of countries, the factual structure of power (its concentration or deconcentration). De jure variables failed to prove significant in this context in any systematic way.…”

“…To test for potential significance of the de jure – de facto constitutional gap, I employ the empirical approach developed in Metelska‐Szaniawska (2009) and extended in Metelska‐Szaniawska (2016), relating the constitutional framework of post‐socialist countries to their performance in economic reforms. Performance in reforming the economy ( econ_reform ; measured by the aggregate transition indicator constituting an average of a set of indicators for six structural reforms calculated by EBRD, 1994–2013, taking values between 1 and 4.33 depending on the advancement in reform) is explained in the model by a set of constitutional variables and a set of control variables.…”

“…To apply this method, two steps are required: First, I verify whether the adoption of the constitution had any effect on economic reforms in each of the post‐socialist countries (and if so, then was the resulting reform gap positive or negative, and what was its magnitude). Estimates of the synthetic counterfactuals and reform dividends obtained for each of the post‐socialist countries in an earlier study (Metelska‐Szaniawska, 2016) are used. Then, in a second step, I study whether, and to what extent, the identified reform gaps for these countries can be explained by the de jure – de facto constitutional gaps (given other potential explanations—path dependence and factors studied previously in the regression frameworks).…”

“…In this endeavour, I draw on the literature seeking to identify the determinants of de jure and de facto constitutional rights protection (e.g. Ben-Bassat & Dahan, 2008, 2016Elkins, Ginsburg, & Simmonds, 2013;Hill, 2010;Keith, Tate, & Poe, 2009;Law & Versteeg, 2013;Melton, 2013;Poe, Tate, & Keith, 1999) and include the following potential determinants of the de jure-de facto constitutional gap in the baseline explorative econometric study: democratization level (democracy), presence of a political conflict (conflict), the number of NGOs as a proxy for the development of civil society (ngos), 21 de facto independence of the judiciary (JI_de_facto), 22 size of the economy measured by GDP per capita (GDPpc), population (population) and ethnic fractionalization (ethnic). As this study concentrates on a particular group of countries-the post-socialist states of Europe and Asia-variables referring to countries' legal origins or general country-group dummies are not included.…”

Post-socialist “illiberal democracies”: do de jure constitutional rights matter?

“…For more on de jure/de facto institutions versus other classifications of institutions see Lewkowicz and Metelska-Szaniawska (2016). Metelska-Szaniawska 2016). In this paper, we are interested in a subset of such interactions, namely cases when de jure constitutional provisions impact (or not) de facto constitutional practice and this in the area of rights protection.…”