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Inferring mechanisms for global constitutional progress

Nature Human Behaviour volume 2, pages 592–599 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Constitutions help define domestic political orders, but are known to be influenced by international mechanisms that are normative, temporal and network based. Here we introduce the concept of the ‘provision space’—the set of all legal provisions existing across the world’s constitutions, which grows over time. We make use of techniques from network science and information retrieval to quantify and compare temporal and network effects on constitutional change, which have been the focus of previous work. Furthermore, we propose that hierarchical effects—a set of mechanisms by which the adoption of certain constitutional provisions leads to or facilitates the adoption of additional provisions—are also crucial. These hierarchical mechanisms appear to play an important role in the emergence of new political rights, and may therefore provide a useful roadmap for advocates of those rights.

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Fig. 1: Provision space.
Fig. 2: Representation of the hierarchical dependencies of provisions based on the sequential adoption by all countries over time.
Fig. 3: Constitutional document similarity.
Fig. 4: Constitutional amendment activity.
Fig. 5: Clustering of time series of provisional adoption.
Fig. 6: Network versus temporal adoption.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to N. Adler for helpful conversations and A. Clauset for the MATLAB code used to derive the minimal violation ranking.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UNICEF Office of Innovation, New York, NY, USA

    Alex Rutherford & Manuel Garcia-Herranz

  2. George Washington University, Washington DC, USA

    Yonatan Lupu

  3. MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Manuel Cebrian & Iyad Rahwan

  4. University of California Merced, Merced, CA, USA

    Brad L. LeVeck

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  1. Alex Rutherford
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Contributions

A.R. and Y.L. analysed the data. All authors contributed to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Alex Rutherford or Manuel Garcia-Herranz.

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Two of the authors (A.R. and M.G.-H.) were employees of UNICEF when this work was completed.

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Supplementary Figures 1–30, Supplementary Notes, Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary Tables 1–17, Supplementary References

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Rutherford, A., Lupu, Y., Cebrian, M. et al. Inferring mechanisms for global constitutional progress. Nat Hum Behav 2, 592–599 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0382-8

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