Abstract
We bring attention to a previously overlooked determinant of de jure-de facto constitutional gaps: a polity’s transition to a nation-state. We argue that nation-statehood, predicated on the formation of a strong sense of national identity, lowers the government’s incentive to violate constitutional provisions. To test our theory, we use a recently released longitudinal database on constitutional compliance and exploit variation in the timing of countries’ attainment of nation-statehood. Our empirical findings substantiate our hypothesis. Based on our preferred estimation approach, nation-statehood bolsters both overall constitutional compliance and constitutional compliance within the subdomains of basic rights, civil rights, and property rights & the rule of law. The estimated long-run effects of nation-statehood on constitutional compliance are considerable in size. Our analysis, thus, illuminates the foundational role of nation-statehood in fostering constitutional compliance.
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Data availability
The data used to produce the results in the paper are publicly available, with precise sources cited in the paper. The computer code supporting the analysis is accessible upon request from the corresponding author.
Notes
Some view the establishment of the English Commonwealth in 1649 as the earliest instance of nation-state creation (Feinstein, 2023).
The described sense of national identity is an individual trait shared by citizens. As such, it is fully consistent with methodological individualism, an important premise of the public choice and constitutional political economy approach (e.g., Van den Hauwe, 1999). See Akerlof and Kranton (2000) for theory and evidence on the general importance of group identity for individual decision-making and Grajzl et al. (2018) for a setting where national identity is a source of intrinsic utility for individuals.
Of course, even within each of the groups of nation-states and non-nation-states there may exist considerable heterogeneity that we do not strive to unpack. In our analysis, we are only interested in assessing the average effect of nation-statehood on constitutional compliance while controlling for the pertinent polity-specific differences.
In the CCCD, the corresponding variable is named cc_total.
See Blume and Voigt (2007) for an empirical derivation of these categories.
For example, ten years before transition to nation-statehood, we observe constitutional compliance for 9 countries, while one year before transition to nation-statehood, we observe constitutional compliance for 22 countries.
This claim remains valid even post Arab Spring.
Acemoglu et al. (2019) encounter an exactly analogous problem in estimating the impact of democracy on per capita output.
In all specifications, the F-test rejects the null hypothesis that the coefficients on the first to fourth lag of the dependent variable are jointly equal to zero.
See Cinelli et al. (2022) for an illustration of overcontrol bias.
The Phillips-Perron test rejects the null hypothesis that all panels contain unit roots for each of the five considered outcome variables.
This entails stacking the observations for each equation, one per each of the four constitutional domains, and then stacking the four equations. In the first step, OLS is applied equation by equation to obtain the regression residuals. In the second step, these residuals are used to estimate the full variance-covariance matrix of the system, embedding the estimated variance-covariance matrix into a standard generalized-least-squares approach.
In contrast, \({\Delta CC}_{c,t-2}^{d}\), \({\Delta CC}_{c,t-3}^{d}\), and \({\Delta CC}_{c,t-4}^{d}\) (for \(s=4\)) are predetermined in (3) and thus uncorrelated with \({\Delta \varepsilon }_{ct}^{d}\).
See Kraay (2015) for a general discussion of the problem of weak instruments when applying the system GMM approach. The very exercise in this subsection shows that our qualitative results are robust to alternative instrumentation strategies.
A reviewer of an earlier draft of our paper noted, for example, that Ghana could be viewed as having attained nation-statehood only in 1979 (rather than 1957, as coded by WF) and Denmark only in 1864 (rather than 1849). Similarly, Norway could be viewed as having attained nation-state status already in 1857 (rather than 1905) and Sweden in 1809 (rather than 1866). Future research awaits the systematic re-assessment of the WF coding, an endeavor we did not undertake.
Detailed results are available upon request.
See Acemoglu et al., (2019: Sec. VI) for an analogous approach to eliciting mechanisms. Importantly, the Gutmann et al. (2023d) constitutional compliance indicators measure compliance for each country with respect to a country-specific standard defined by the country’s own constitutional provisions. As such, the construction of the Gutmann et al. (2023d) compliance measures is only minimally affected by the extensiveness of constitutional protections. Therefore, even if we find empirical evidence in favor of the candidate mechanism, there should exist a further mechanism that explains the uncovered effect of nation-statehood on constitutional compliance and that is independent of any effect arising via substantive constitutional constraints alone.
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Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. Peter Grajzl is grateful to Jon Eastwood for introducing him to ideas about national identity and for engaging in many insightful conversations.
Funding
Jerg Gutmann and Stefan Voigt gratefully acknowledge financial support as part of a joint Beethoven research project by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN, #2016/23/G/HS4/04371) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, #381589259).
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Grajzl, P., Gutmann, J. & Voigt, S. The nation-state foundations of constitutional compliance. Const Polit Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-023-09427-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-023-09427-8