ECC - Economics of Compliance with Constitutions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan Voigt
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics ; Public Law ; Political Science
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 381589259

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

The economics of constitutional compliance (ECC)–project has shed light on a so far largely unexplored research question: How can we measure the discrepancy between constitutional text and constitutional practice and what are the causes and consequences of the existence of such de jure-de facto gaps? The now publicly available Comparative Constitutional Compliance Database (CCCD) was produced as part of this project and allows researchers to study constitutional compliance in 175 countries on an annual basis since 1900. This wealth of new data has resulted in over a dozen published studies, which illuminate causes and consequences of constitutional compliance. Moreover, the ECC project has conducted conjoint experiments on representative samples of the German and Polish population to study rule-of-law backsliding under the Polish PiS government. Further online experiments were conducted via MTurk in dozens of democracies around the world to study how citizens react to the information that a public policy may violate the constitution. It shows that citizens support for policies declines when a court indicates that they may violate the constitution, a phenomenon that we name constitutional loyalty. The size of this effect, however, depends critically on how much trust citizens have in the courts. Moreover, lab experiments were conducted to study whether constiutitonal rules can help citizens in holding their governments accountable by coordinating collective action and to understand whether governments under limiting constitutional rules indeed are less prone to extract resources for their private benefit. Among many other insights generated in the ECC project, the concept of militant constitutionalism has been developed and empirically evaluated. Militant constitutionalism is closely related to militant democracy, a concept developed due to the experiences of the Weimar republic and Nazi Germany to prevent would-be autocrats from entering political offices. Militant constitutionalism complements militant democracy by trying to minimize the harm would-be autocrats can cause if they win an election.

Publications

• Militant constitutionalism: a promising concept to make constitutional backsliding less likely?. Public Choice, 195(3-4), 377-404.
  Gutmann, Jerg & Voigt, Stefan
  
• Mind the gap: Analyzing the divergence between constitutional text and constitutional reality. International Journal of Constitutional Law, 19(5), 1778-1809.
  Voigt, Stefan
  
• Coups and the dynamics of media freedom. Economic Modelling, 116, 106025.
  Bjørnskov, Christian; Freytag, Andreas & Gutmann, Jerg
  
• Unconstitutional States of Emergency. The Journal of Legal Studies, 51(2), 455-481.
  Bjørnskov, Christian; Voigt, Stefan & Khesali, Mahdi
  
• Judicial independence: Why does de facto diverge from de jure?. European Journal of Political Economy, 79, 102454.
  Hayo, Bernd & Voigt, Stefan
  
• Shocking resilience? Effects of extreme events on constitutional compliance. Journal of Institutional Economics, 20.
  Choutagunta, Abishek; Gutmann, Jerg & Voigt, Stefan
  
• The comparative constitutional compliance database. The Review of International Organizations, 19(1), 95-115.
  Gutmann, Jerg; Metelska-Szaniawska, Katarzyna & Voigt, Stefan
  
• How do citizens define and value the rule of law? A conjoint experiment in Germany and Poland. Journal of European Public Policy, 32(4), 899-925.
  Gutmann, Jerg; Kantorowicz, Jaroslaw & Voigt, Stefan
  
• Leader characteristics and constitutional compliance. European Journal of Political Economy, 84, 102423.
  Gutmann, Jerg; Metelska-Szaniawska, Katarzyna & Voigt, Stefan
  
• The nation-state foundations of constitutional compliance. Constitutional Political Economy.
  Grajzl, Peter; Gutmann, Jerg & Voigt, Stefan