Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review?

Tom Ginsburg and Mila Versteeg

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2014, vol. 30, issue 3, 587-622

Abstract: In recent decades, there has been a wide-ranging global movement towards constitutional review. This development poses important puzzles of political economy: Why would self-interested governments willingly constrain themselves by constitutional means? What explains the global shift toward judicial supremacy? Though different theories have been proposed, none have been systematically tested against each other using quantitative empirical methods. In this article, we utilize a unique new dataset on constitutional review for 204 countries for the period 1781–2011 to test various theories that explain the adoption of constitutional review. Using a fixed-effects spatial lag model, we find substantial evidence that the adoption of constitutional review is driven by domestic electoral politics. By contrast, we find no general evidence that constitutional review adoption results from ideational factors, federalism, or international norm diffusion. (JEL: K00, K19, K49)

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewt008 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:30:y:2014:i:3:p:587-622.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization is currently edited by Andrea Prat

More articles in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().