Over the last couple of decades, non-majoritarian institutions (NMIs) have been introduced in many countries. Of late, they have been criticized as promoting technocracy to the detriment of democracy. A number of political scientists even argue that they would strengthen populists and be, hence,...

The rule of law, a fundamental value of the European Union (EU), has come under stress in a number of its member states. The EU's response to these stresses has been criticized as politicized, slow, and unassertive. This research note develops a proposal to improve the current procedure.

Constitutional Economics - the analysis of constitutions drawing on the economic approach - has made important progress over the last two decades. The factors determining whether a constitution is complied with, however, have received only little attention. This is surprising, as a huge gap...

It is now abundantly clear that social norms channel behavior and impact economic development. This insight leads to the question: How do social norms evolve? This survey examines research that relies on geography to explain the development of social norms, and suggests that religion and family...

Over the last three decades, plea bargaining procedures have been adopted by a large number of jurisdictions worldwide. However, a comprehensive account of the current adoption and use of such procedures is still missing. We survey 174 jurisdictions, finding that 101 of them have a formalized...

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...

We study the long-term and dynamic relationship between de jure and de facto judicial independence using a large panel dataset covering 50 countries over a period of 50 years. Our analysis shows a negative relationship between these variables, a sharp cont rast to the prevailing theoretical view...

Based on data from the EU Justice Scoreboard, we identify a puzzle: National levels of judicial independence (as perceived by the citizens of EU member states) are negatively associated with the presence of formal legislation usually considered as conducive to judicial independence. We try to...

Measurement of both federalism and decentralization has been contentious. We introduce three new indicators reflecting important aspects of both federalism and decentralization. The three new indicators are the result of principal component analysis. When we try to identify their main...

This paper does three things. First, based on a limited number of theoretically established dimensions, it proposes a new de facto indicator for the rule of law. It is the first such indicator to take the quality of legal norms explicitly into account. Second, using this indicator we shed new...