This article introduces a novel database that measures governments' compliance with national constitutions. It combines information on de jure constitutional rules with data on their de facto implementation. The individual compliance indicators can be grouped into four categories that we...

Constitutional loyalty, the importance ascribed to complying with constitutional rules, is difficult to measure across countries due to differences in context, history, and culture. We overcome this challenge by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as an ideal setting in which societies around the...

Since the time of the Protestant reformation, Western societies typically consider themselves not to be governed by divine law but based on a social contract. While all rules governing a society are part of this social contract, a country's written constitution is a central and possibly the most...

This article introduces a novel database that measures governments’ compliance with national constitutions. It combines information on de jure constitutional rules with data on their de facto implementation. The individual compliance indicators can be grouped into four categories that we...

This paper makes the case that current social contracts are often inadequate, irrelevant, or unjust for informal workers. It outlines three possible future scenarios: the bad old contract, an even worse contract, and a better new contract. Under the bad old contract, informal workers lacked...

Building on a World Bank regional study in Africa aiming at measuring social contracts concepts and within the framework of reflecting on future donor interventions, this paper applies social contracts measurement and complements with qualitative assessments in Somalia. This paper uses the...