In the eighth century, Charles Martel confiscated Church property to make distributions of benefices and precaria to his vassals. This project was an investment in state capacity and secularizations of Church property were continued under Charles' son Pippin III. Many scholars have characterized...

Classical liberals favor an institutional environment of economic freedom. A society's institutional environment emerges as a set of political outcomes that take shape within a higher- order framework or constitution. While many scholars have explored the relationship between institutional...

Why are some constitutions amended frequently and others hardly at all? An obvious candidate determinant is constitutional rigidity, i.e., the size and number of procedural barriers to amendment. Given some demand for amendment, greater rigidity implies a smaller supply. However, measures of...

A rough balance of political power between monarchs and a militarized landed aristocracy characterized medieval Western Europe. Scholars have argued that this balance of power contributed to a tradition of limited government and constitutional bargaining. I argue that fifth and sixth century...

Tsebelis and Nardi (2016) and Tsebelis (2017) report that constitutional length correlates with lower levels of GDP per capita. They argue that this may be the case because longer constitutions lead to greater corruption. However, uncovering a causal relationship between constitutional length...

We use Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) data to explore whether Constitutions that follow revolutions are designed differently. We employ matching methods using 31 treatments (revolutionary Constitutions) and 162 control units (new Constitutional adoptions without a revolution). We find...