SID: The Comparative Constitutions Project

The Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) was initiated and designed by Professor Zachary Elkins (Political Science) and Thomas Ginsburg (Law and Political Science).  The Cline Center has provided it with funding, housing and administrative support since its inception.  It is an integral part of the SID project and a cross-cutting source of information for the project.  The goal of the CCP is to collect data on the formal characteristics of written constitutions. The efforts of the CCP have been divided into three concurrent phases.

The first phase involves constructing constitutional chronologies for independent states. Reconstructing constitutional chronologies is a challenging task and team members relied upon a collection of cross-national, regional, and country-level sources in order to construct them.  The unit of analysis in constructing these chronologies is the “constitutional event,” which includes both original constitutions and constitutional amendments.  Although the team members are constantly adding new constitutional events as they occur, they have largely completed the historical, identifying more than 2000 constitutional events since 1789.

The second phase of the project involves the acquisition of authoritative English texts for every constitutional event. Thanks to the monumental efforts of several previous comparative constitutional scholars and resources at the University of Illinois Library, reliable English translations of historical constitutions are available for a large proportion of all the constitutional events identified. Of the 2,224 constitutional events identified (1,412 of which are amendments), the project has acquired what appear to be reliable English translations of 1,162.  The vast majority of the constitutional events lacking reliable English translations are constitutional amendments and many of them are historical events.  Indeed, texts for all 594 constitutions are available, but 191 of these texts are in the native language.  Efforts are currently underway to translate these documents and to acquire the texts for the missing events.

The third phase of the project involved the systematic coding of the information in the various constitutional texts.  This involved developing, pretesting and refining a survey instrument; constructing a survey engine; and devising and implementing a strategy to code the translated constitutional texts.

The development of the survey instrument began with a review of existing efforts to code constitutional data.  The project also worked with a distinguished Board of Advisors.  After several months of concerted effort, and a great deal of input from the Board of Advisors, a relatively stable survey instrument was constructed.  Extensive pretesting led to the development of final document, which contains more that 650 questions.  In order facilitate the coding process a survey engine was designed to fit the needs of the project. To code the constitutional events, a team of undergraduate, graduate, and law students have been employed and trained to enter data into the web survey.

To minimize errors in the final dataset, each constitutional event is surveyed twice by different coders working independently. After this double-coding, each constitution is reviewed by a trained reconciler to check for errors and to resolve discrepancies among the coders.  Regular group sessions were held involving the coders.  Much more information can be obtained on the Comparative Constitutions Project by going to its website: http://www.comparativeconstitutionsproject.org/.