The Comparative Constitutions Project has its origins at the University of Illinois, where Elkins and Ginsburg taught until 2008. Staff at the Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois and its director Peter Nardulli, continue to be indispensable partners in the project. Part of the inspiration for the project came from observations about constitutional reform in prominent cases such as Iraq and Afghanistan, which indicated that political scientists and legal scholars are not adequately equipped to advise constitutional assemblies about how to craft documents that solve important problems of governance. External consultants and indigenous constitutional framers alike lack even the most basic information: a systematic catalog of constitutional provisions in other countries, past and present. A common result, one that Mark Tushnet (1999) terms bricolage, is a haphazard and accidental cobbling-together of constitutional elements from other countries. A full menu of institutional options is something that should be on hand at constitutional assemblies, and it is even more important that such systematic data inform the analysis of comparative legal scholars long before they provide advice to constitution-drafters. Data on the characteristics of constitutions, both their form and content, are essential to test hypotheses regarding the origins and consequences of constitutional law. We endeavor to fill this void by producing a cross-national historical dataset of written constitutions, to service a set of research questions regarding the origins and consequences of constitutional law and, not at all incidentally, the design of constitutions in developing and transitioning democracies.

Please follow the links below to learn more about the project.

Theoretical Motivations
Research Design and Data
CCP in the News
Courses

The Comparative Constitutions Project is directed by Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton.

Zachary Elkins is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas, Austin. Before that, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois. He received a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on issues of democracy, national identity, and institutional reform, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Designed by Diffusion:  Constitutional Reform in Developing Democracies which examines the origins of democratic institutions in the developing world. 

Tom Ginsburg is Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Illinois, where he taught full-time until 2008. He holds B.A., J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. His 2003 book, Judicial Review in New Democracies, published by Cambridge University Press, won the Wayne LaFave Faculty Scholarship Award from the University of Illinois and the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association for best book on law and courts in 2004. He has served as an advisor to the Judicial Commission of Afghanistan and worked in several Asian countries on legal and constitutional reform issues.

James Melton is an assistant professor in Economics and Institutional Change at the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy. He received a B.A. degree from Illinois Wesleyan University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on democracy, democratization, political participation, and institutional reform.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the University of Illinois, the Cline Center for Democracy, the University of Illinois College of Law, the University of Chicago, the University of Texas, and the National Science Foundation. We owe a special thanks to the Cline Center for Democracy, which serves as the project's administrative and intellectual home.

We are also grateful to the members of our advisory board for their thoughtful and generous guidance.

Board of Advisors