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 2022, with yearly updates. 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 Advanced Social Research. 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, where they are based, respectively.
A first stage of the project entailed the documentation, or census, of each historical constitutional "event" (e.g., replacement, amendment, suspension, etc.) for each of the countries included in the sample. The sample includes every recognized independent state in the Ward and Gleditsch list[1] (including most micro states) that has existed for at least some period since 1789. Those data have been useful to researchers who study the institutional reform.[2] A second component of the project is a set of data with some 650 characteristics of these constitutions (and their revisions, aggregated yearly). 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
28th Amendment Project
Citations to the project
Data from the project has been used in research by scholars of comparative politics and comparative law. The data, particularly the indexed texts, are widely used by constitutional drafters to guide the inventory and choices of constitutional drafters.
Recognition
Semantic Web
References
- ^ Gleditsch, Kristian S.; Ward, Michael D. (1999-12-01). "A revised list of independent states since the congress of Vienna". International Interactions. 25 (4): 393–413. doi:10.1080/03050629908434958. ISSN 0305-0629.
- ^ Elkins, Zachary; Ginsburg, Tom; Melton, James (2009-10-12). The Endurance of National Constitutions. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-73132-4.