A critical task is the review and selection of those attributes of constitutions to be included in the survey. At this point our survey instrument contains over 650 questions. Our strategy has been to begin with those concepts closely related to our own research interests – that is, for example, judicial review, presidentialism versus parliamentarism, methods of executive and legislative selection, and federalism. However, since our intention is to describe constitutions and their various elements more completely we developed a more comprehensive process of reviewing the literature on comparative constitutionalism, reading a large sample of actual constitutions, and consulting with scholars of constitutional design. Below you can view more information about the questions as well as the full survey instrument.

Designing the Survey Instrument - We began by reviewing the limited number of data projects on the topic. In this regard, the Maarseveen and van der Tang (1978) volume served as a particularly useful foundation from which to build, as did the key system that was developed by Tschentscher (2004). Other comparative sources helped us catalog the various ingredients of historical constitutions including those as diverse as the simple United States document to the lengthy Brazilian one to Soviet-inspired documents. After several months of editing, we settled on a fairly stable draft of the survey instrument. In order to review our draft and provide general guidance on substantive and operational strategy, we have formed an advisory board of leading scholars on comparative constitutional law (view the Board of Advisors). These advisors, who have taken their role quite seriously, have been extremely helpful in the development of the survey instrument. Each advisor has reviewed a preliminary copy of the survey instrument and offered substantive and operational suggestions, sometimes in five or six pages. Many continue to send suggestions by e-mail. Based on the sometimes extensive comments of these experienced constitutional scholars, we have refined our question set considerably.

Question Categories - General Characteristics, Amendment Provisions, Legislature, Executive, Judiciary, Federalism, Electoral Provisions, Regulatory and Oversight Institutions, International Provisions, Duties, Rights, Criminal Procedure Provisions, and Special Issues Domains (such as protection of the environment, treatment of the mass media, and regulation of the military).

Question Types - A crucial step has been to transform our concepts and indicators into survey items and accompanying instructions that are clear and comprehensible for our coders. Our instrument includes three types of questions: (1) open-ended responses; (2) single-answer multiple choice; and (3) multiple-answer multiple choice. When possible we have drafted closed-ended questions of the second and third type. Even these questions, however, allow the coder to respond "other" or "unable to determine," followed by an open-ended response. For more fine-grained topics or those that we judged to be better dealt with inductively, we have specified open-ended response formats.

Citation and Comment Information - In addition to the actual survey response, the survey instrument asks for two pieces of information for each question: (1) the section or article of the constitution that served as the source of the coder's response, and (2) the coder's comments. While coders are required (for almost all questions) to provide the first piece of information, coders are expected to use the comments only to dentify any problems of interpretation or to add responses that are not included among the pre-established choices. As we describe below, both the citation information and the comments are crucial for reconciling divergent answers among multiple coders of a single document.

Instructions to Coders - Below most questions on the survey, we have provided instructions that clarify the question or offer help with respect to known issues of interpretation. Most of these instructions derive from our experience with coder problems and questions during the pilot study.

CLICK HERE to view the Survey Instrument (.pdf)