Which Constitutional Provisions Are Most Important?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62355/ejels.21907Keywords:
constitutional design, expert survey, empirical constitutional lawAbstract
National constitutions codify provisions on a wide range of topics, ranging from presidential term limits to the country’s flag. But are all constitutional provisions equally important? Some are likely to be particularly consequential for how governments function, while others are likely to be largely symbolic. To date, there has been little research on the relative importance of constitutional provisions. To explore current thinking on this subject, we assembled a group of twelve comparative constitutional scholars to rate the relative importance of 340 constitutional provisions to the functioning of a country’s government. These aggregate ratings make three contributions to constitutional studies: (1) provide evidence on the current state of academic thought on the comparative importance of constitutional provisions; (2) establish an index of constitutional importance to be used in future research projects; and (3) offer a roadmap that could help direct research to provisions that may be more likely to have significant impacts on governance-related outcomes.References
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Copyright (c) 2024 Richard Albert, Netta Barak-Corren, Daniel M. Brinks, Adam Chilton, Rosalind Dixon, Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, Ran Hirschl, David Landau, Ashley Moran, Yvonne Tew, Mila Versteeg
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