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. The primary objective of the data collection was to understand the orgins and consequences of constitutional choices.[1] Most of the seed money for the project 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.
Datasets
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[2] (including most micro states) in existence for some period since 1789. This event dataset has been useful to researchers who study the institutional reform has become a standard accounting of the census of historical constitutions.[3][4] Currently, the project lists the existence of 8XX constitutional "systems" since 1789, 3XXX amendments to these systems, XXX suspensions, and XXX interim constitutions. The project has collected the text for almost every system as well as that for some 80% of the amendments to these systems. (They list a set of "most wanted" texts for those that they are missing).
A second, and central, component of the project is the coding of some 650 characteristics of these constitutions (and their revisions, aggregated yearly).[5] More than 200 studies have employed the data for the analysis of the origins and effects of constitutional choices, as well as a description of institutional forms over time. The authors have published several studies about the reliability and comparability of the data.[6][7]
A number of data projects have spun off from the core sets of data. For example, a number of data projects have recorded information about the process of constitution making. Other researchers have deepened the analysis by coding topics in more detail. The project site maps some of these related data projects.
Repository of Texts (Constitute)
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
- ^ "Comparative Constitutions Project - Informing Constitutional Design". Comparative Constitutions Project. 2023-08-08. Retrieved 2023-09-13.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Cite to the event data
- ^ Characteristics of National Constitutions. Documentation and Data. To be completed
- ^ Melton, James; Elkins, Zachary; Ginsburg, Tom; Leetaru, Kalev (2012-10-09). "On the Interpretability of Law: Lessons from the Decoding of National Constitutions". British Journal of Political Science. 43 (2): 399–423. doi:10.1017/s0007123412000361. ISSN 0007-1234.
- ^ Elkins, Zachary; Ginsburg, Tom (2021-05-11). "What Can We Learn from Written Constitutions?". Annual Review of Political Science. 24 (1): 321–343. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-100720-102911. ISSN 1094-2939.