Social Rights in the Constitution and in Practice

Realizing Social Rights: The Material Impacts of Constitutional Entrenchment

“…Similar findings have been made with respect to the correlation of human rights instruments and health-related outcomes (Palmer et al, 2009), and are echoed in the early large-N research on domestic social and economic rights guarantees. In a study of economic and social rights in 68 countries, Ben-Bassat and Dahan (2008) found some positive correlations between rights entrenchment and realization, but concluded that constitutional commitments regarding education and health were generally consistent with the "cheap talk" hypothesis in that they are of limited effect in terms of public policy or material outcomes. In a similar study based on 160 countries, Bjornskov & Mchangama (2013)social and cultural rights (ESCRs found no compelling evidence of the positive impact of constitutionally entrenching rights to health, education, or social security, but did find evidence of adverse medium term effects on both education and inflation, leading them to conclude that "the historical experience since the 1960s shows that the introduction of [Economic Social and Cultural Rights] in national constitutions is, at best, inconsequential" (2013: 26)social and cultural rights (ESCRs.…”

“…Rather than influencing law and policy, their content would be a product of the underlying legal tradition. More insidiously, social rights entrenchment intended to placate or curry favour with domestic or international interests (Renner, 2010(Renner, [1949; Hathaway, 2007;Ben-Bassat;Dahan 2008), or induce the commitment of scarce civil society and opposition resources into litigation, a forum in which they are structurally disadvantaged, rather than more effective methods of seeking political change (Galanter, 1974;Rosenberg, 2008).…”

Empirical Comparative Law

“…Reforms often come in packages or react to changed circumstances unobserved by the researcher. 17 For example, many Asian countries improved shareholder protection in response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997/1998 while they were recovering from a recession and implementing numerous other reforms. Unless such contemporaneous changes are carefully controlled for------and this is usually not possible in ECL owing to lack of data and contextual information------DD estimates of the causal effect can easily be more biased than cross--sectional estimates.…”

“…There are other ways of using panel data that do not remove all cross--sectional variation; they are affected by a mixture of the problems discussed in this and the previous paragraph, and my sense is that they tend to obscure rather than ameliorate them. 17 Diffusion studies present a special case of these problems (Spamann 2010a, sect. IV.C).…”

Constitutions, regulations, and taxes: Contradictions of different aspects of decentralization

“…Moreover, other regions (without the status of republics) also passed their articles (ustav). The constitutions were quite similar in terms of guarantees and rights declared to their citizens (and hence, there is no variation in their socio-economic content, unlike in case of, say, OECD constitutions, see Ben-Bassat and Dahan, 2008), with may be the only exception of the agricultural land private property. However, they varied quite substantially in terms of the design of political system and also the distribution of power between the federal government and the region.…”