The cultural evolution of national constitutions

Abstract

We explore how ideas from infectious disease and genetics can be used to uncover patterns of cultural inheritance and innovation in a corpus of 591 national constitutions spanning 1789–2008. Legal “ideas” are encoded as “topics”—words statistically linked in documents—derived from topic modeling the corpus of constitutions. Using these topics we derive a diffusion network for borrowing from ancestral constitutions back to the US Constitution of 1789 and reveal that constitutions are complex cultural recombinants. We find systematic variation in patterns of borrowing from ancestral texts and “biological”‐like behavior in patterns of inheritance, with the distribution of “offspring” arising through a bounded preferential‐attachment process. This process leads to a small number of highly innovative (influential) constitutions some of which have yet to have been identified as so in the current literature. Our findings thus shed new light on the critical nodes of the constitution‐making network. The constitutional network structure reflects periods of intense constitution creation, and systematic patterns of variation in constitutional lifespan and temporal influence.

Who do sovereign wealth funds say they are? Using structural topic modeling to delineate variegated capitalism in their official reports

“…We think our study could be complemented by using STM to study annual reports of SWFs over time to see influences between organizations and an evolution of the groups we have identified, in a similar way Rockmore et al (2016) have done when studying constitutions over time around the world. Finally, we think mapping out the influence of professional organizations on top of more traditional institutions related to markets and the State will help identify another avenue of change and adaptation of the capitalist system.…”

What Can We Learn from Written Constitutions?

“…Just as some might want to identify indigenous as opposed to exogenous constitutions in order to isolate the impact of constitutions, others will want to identify these factors in order to test historical theories about the origins of constitutional ideas. Automated text analysis of constitutions provides one methodological angle, among others (Rutherford et al 2018;Law 2016Law , 2019Law & Whalen 2020;Rockmore et al 2018). But the broader point is that this set of historical questions is, in an important sense, central to the study of democratization and autocratization, arguably the most enduring research program in comparative politics.…”

A Multinetwork and Machine Learning Examination of Structure and Content in the United States Code

“…The USC is organized in a nested fashion with multiple levels wherein section is the core organizational unit, containing thematic blocks of text. 6 We treat these sections as the documents for topic modelling purposes.…”

“…For more background on the Code, see [52]. 6 For example, Section 112 of Title 42 is "Removal of revenue officers from port during epidemic" and states "Whenever, by the prevalence of any contagious or epidemic disease in or near the place by law established as the port of entry for any collection district, it becomes dangerous or inconvenient for the officers of the revenue employed therein to continue the discharge of their respective offices at such port, the Secretary of the Treasury, or, in his absence, the Undersecretary of the Treasury, may direct the removal of the officers of the revenue from such port to any other more convenient place, within, or as near as may be to, such collection district. And at such place such officers may exercise the same powers, and shall be liable to the same duties, according to existing circumstances, as in the port or district established by law.…”

“…This puts the study of statutes squarely within the vibrant body of research that is bringing to bear the tools of complex systems and machine learning on legal documents and the law (see [5] for a recent survey). For example, it may be that there are temporal or geographic determinants of a statutory network that may influence the diffusion of legal culture over space and time [6]. There may also be consequences of certain statutory network features, such as regulatory complexity, that increase legal transaction costs [7] or lead to hidden "cumulative" costs of regulation [8].…”