This paper considers why it is that drafters of national constitutions incorporate international law, a phenomenon that is of growing importance. It argues that designers do so when they need to make credible commitments, and that international law has some unique features that render it...

We build towards a prediction of the content of the world's constitutions, conditional upon the absence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The paper, at this juncture, is one-part research design, and one-part evidence. The theory guiding the background causal mechanism is...

This article responds to a set of well-known challenges to empirical research on formal institutions in comparative politics. We focus on the case of written constitutions and discuss the scholarly utility of studying such documents in the face of four analytic and theoretical challenges. Each...

Constitution-making is a ubiquitous but poorly understood phenomenon. There is much speculation but relatively little evidence about the impact of different design processes on constitutional outcomes. Much of the debate reduces to the question of who is involved in the process and when. We...

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken...

This article makes a conceptual and theoretical contribution to the study of clustered political and economic reforms. Conceptually, we review the use and meaning of the concept of diffusion as well as its related terms. We suggest that the concept be reserved for processes (not outcomes)...

Over the past forty-five years, bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have become the most important international legal mechanism for the encouragement and governance of foreign direct investment. Their proliferation over the past two decades in particular has been phenomenal. These...

The presidential-parliamentary distinction is foundational to comparative politics and at the center of a large theoretical and empirical literature. However, an examination of constitutional texts suggests a fair degree of heterogeneity within these categories with respect to important...