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Constitutional Political Economy 
December 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4, pp 311–320 | Cite as

A proposal for a more objective measure of de facto constitutional constraints



In this paper we propose two new indicators of de facto constitutional constraints. The indicators are based on the presence or the absence of easily observable political events. This makes the proposed measures relatively objective and easy to verify relative to the most widely used indicators of de jure and de facto constitutions. This paper describes the indicators and demonstrates their usefulness for research on economic development.


De facto constitutional constraints Constitutional constraints Expert ranking Retrospective assessments Democracy and growth


P50 N40 O43 C81



We wish to thank the Editor in Chief Roger Congleton for his help that greatly influenced this article. We are also grateful to three anonymous referees for comments and references.







Yanovskiy, M. & Ginker, T. Const Polit Econ (2017) 28: 311. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-017-9242-1



