What Can We Learn from Written Constitutions?

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 of these challenges, in turn, implies a set of empirical questions, for which we invoke original data to sketch a broad-brushed set of answers. The data analysis and accompanying discussion suggest a set of guidelines for how written constitutions should be deployed in comparative research designs on topics that involve political institutions