Measuring Long Run Constitutional Textual Entrenchment and Its Effects

Abstract

The ability for a society’s institutions to provide certainty to organizations and individuals has been theoretically and empirically linked to beneficial long run political, economic and social outcomes. Among the political institutions subject to turnover is a nation’s constitution itself. But in contrast to the long-heralded benefits of constitutional entrenchment are the empirically identified benefits of sufficient flexibility in amendment rules and increasing constitutional specificity. These countervailing forces suggest a theoretically optimal level of constitutional entrenchment. In our analysis here, we develop a set of computational measures of textual constitutional change over time, and then consider the relationship between these measures of entrenchment in a nation’s fundamental ruleset with several measures of political economic, and social outcomes. More specifically, we generate distance measures between constitutional texts within a given nation and explore the relationship between the change in textual distance over time, and governance outcomes, GDP per capita, and augmented human development. Our empirical results suggest that constitutional text matters most significantly for governance, but also appears to influence economic output and human development more broadly.