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Review Article
Open Access
What Can We Learn from Written Constitutions?
- Zachary Elkins1, and Tom Ginsburg2
- Vol. 24:321-343 (Volume publication date May 2021) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-100720-102911
- First published as a Review in Advance on February 26, 2021
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Copyright © 2021 by Annual Reviews.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information
Abstract
This article responds to a set of well-known challenges to empirical research on formal institutions in comparative politics. We focus on the case of written constitutions and discuss the scholarly utility of studying such documents in the face of four analytic and theoretical challenges. Each of these challenges, in turn, implies a set of empirical questions, for which we invoke original data to sketch a broad-brushed set of answers. The data analysis and accompanying discussion suggest a set of guidelines for how written constitutions should be deployed in comparative research designs on topics that involve political institutions.
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2024-04-26
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-100720-102911
What Can We Learn from Written Constitutions?
Annual Review of Political Science 24, 321 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-100720-102911
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-100720-102911
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-100720-102911
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