WORKING PAPERS

Here are titles, abstracts, and links to my most recent working papers. (Check back often; more are always on the way!)

Public Participation and Constitutional Compliance

with Jamie Bologna Pavlik

Many Constitutions are ratified by referendum; and public participation in earlier stages of Constitution-making is increasingly common. Indeed, major international organizations advocate for such participation. Public participation may aid in “overcoming sub-optimal political conditions” and “increase the legitimacy of the constitution” (Hudson 2021, p. 502). If this is true, one expects public participation to lead to higher Constitutional compliance. We exploit the Eisenstadt et al. (2015, 2017) Constitutionalism and Democracy Database (CDD), which provides information on public participation in Constitution-making, and the Gutmann et al. (2023) Comparative Constitutional Compliance Database (CCCD). We consider Constitution-making episodes and define treatments in terms of the extent of public participation. Employing matching methods, we find little evidence of a positive effect of participation on compliance generally. However, there is compelling evidence of a positive effect on compliance with provisions specific to property rights and the rule of law.

Revolutionary Constitutional Compliance

with Jamie Bologna Pavlik and Justin T. Callais 

Revolutions are bottom-up movements for regime change that, if successful, overthrow and replace a society’s principal institutions. Successful revolutions are often followed by a new Constitution. We explore whether revolutionary Constitutions, all else equal, lead to higher compliance than their non-revolutionary counterparts. To do so we combine data from the Comparative Constitutional Compliance Database (CCCD; Gutmann et al. 2023) and the Revolutionary Episodes Dataset (RED; Beissinger 2022). We identify 15 revolutionary Constitutions, adopted between 1976 and 2010, and consider their compliance relative to that of their predecessors. We employ matching methods (Rosenbaum and Rubin 1983), drawing on up to 61 cases of (non-revolutionary) Constitutional adoptions to construct counterfactual episodes. Revolutionary Constitutions lead to higher compliance at least 5 years out from their adoption. At 10 years out, the positive overall compliance effect gets weaker. However, the effect remains significant for basic human and civil rights provisions.