Comparative Constitutions Project
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The Comparative Constitutions Project is an academic study of the content of the world's constitutions from 1789 to the current day. The project was founded by Zachary Elkins and Tom Ginsburg in 2005 when they were colleagues at the University of Illinois and fellows at the Cline Center for Democracy. Most of the seed money came from the Cline Center as well as two successive grants from the National Science Foundation. James Melton, a graduate student at Illinois, joined Elkins and Ginsburg as a full collaborator before leaving academia in 2013. The project continues to be administered by Elkins and Ginsburg as a collaboration between the University of Texas and the University of Chicago.
A first stage of the project entailed the documentation, or census, of each constitutional "event" (e.g., replacement, amendment, suspension, etc.) for each of the countries included in the sample. The sample includes every independent state that has existed since 1789, as identified in Ward and Gleditsch's census of independent states. A second component of the project is a set of data with some 650 characteristics of constitutions and revisions to these constitutions. In 2013, CCP teamed up with Google Ideas (now Jigsaw) to launch Constitute, an indexed repository of currently-in-force constitutional texts. The point of Constitute is to provide representative text for each of 330 constitutional topics for constitutional drafters throughout the world.
Topic Enrichment
Endurance of National Constitutions 28th Amendment Project