State provision of constitutional goods

Abstract

International audienceThis paper investigates the impact of constitutional rights on the level of public expenditure in a large sample of countries. To do so, we construct a panel of 73 countries from 1960 to 2011. We first investigate factors that drive constitutional changes regarding constitutional rights. To address potential endogeneity concerns in the choice of constitutional rules, we rely on an instrumental variable within estimation (country and time fixed effects) to estimate the impact of constitutional rights on government size. We find that larger governments tend to inscribe fewer rights in their constitutions, but we do not detect any impact of constitutional rights on the government size

The Effect of Constitutional Commitment to Social Security on Social Expenditure Schemes

“…Hence, the positive estimate of the effect of CCSS on social expenditure is a conservative estimate if the effect of social expenditure on CCSS is negative. Further, Espinosa (2016) finds fragile evidence that constitutional rights are more likely to induce larger governments only for a sample of democratic countries. Our sample exists of merely democratic countries and we use social expenditure rather than government expenditure and CCSS instead of their more general constitutional rights indicator, which makes it more likely that we find a positive significant effect.…”

“…When taking a broader perspective, Espinosa (2016) finds that countries that spend more tend to inscribe fewer rights in their constitution. In line with this, social expenditure may have a negative effect on CCSS.…”