The Comparative Constitutional Compliance Database

Which Constitutional Provisions Are Most Important?

“…We focused on democracies, in addition to countries in general, for two reasons. First, evidence suggests that higher-order laws are more likely to influence the behavior of democracies than autocracies (e.g., Simmons 2009;Ginsburg 2022;Gutmann, Metelska-Szaniawska, and Voigt 2023). Second and more normatively, we are more interested in understanding which constitutional design choices are important for constitutional drafting processes that strive towards democracy, rather than those focused on goals like extending presidential term limits to help shore up the power of autocratic leaders.…”

“…Beyond the CCP, other datasets have coded other specific aspects of constitutions. For instance, there are now datasets that code the specific rights commitments included in constitutions (e.g., Law and Versteeg 2011); the processes countries used to draft their constitutions (e.g., Eisenstadt, LeVan, and Maboudi 2017); the presence of unwritten, small-c constitutional provisions (Chilton and Versteeg 2022b); the presence of civic duties within constitutions (Altan and Versteeg 2023); and the degree of compliance with constitutions (e.g., Gutmann, Metelska-Szaniawska, and Voigt 2023).…”

Shocking resilience? Effects of extreme events on constitutional compliance

“…The indicator of constitutional compliance is introduced in Gutmann et al . (2023b) and is publicly available as part of the Comparative Constitutional Compliance Database. Gutmann et al .…”

“…This article ties into an emerging literature on the economics of constitutional compliance (Gutmann et al ., 2023b; Lewkowicz and Metelska-Szaniawska, 2019; Voigt, 2021) by analysing conditions under which compliance with ( de jure ) constitutional rules can break down. The question of constitutional compliance has been largely ignored by scholars of law and economics, public choice and institutional economics, even though all these disciplines recognize that constitutions have substantial consequences for the quality of governance as well as for economic outcomes (see, e.g.…”

“…One reason why constitutional compliance has not been studied more is a lack of adequate data. With the recently introduced Comparative Constitutional Compliance Database (Gutmann et al ., 2023b), data for studying the gap between de jure constitutional rules and their de facto implementation is now readily available. We offer one of the first studies utilizing this new database to analyse the determinants of constitutional compliance.…”