Suchergebnisse

This chapter develops three comparative perspectives. Beginning with direct democracy, enhancing the direct participation of people as in Switzerland—considered revolutionary in the nineteenth century—may still be regarded a progressive form of democracy. But are increased political rights, offering the people not only a voice in electing their representatives but also a chance to decide major decisions directly, really an efficient way to improve democracy? The second perspective deals with federalism. Traditionally understood as a means for the vertical division of power within states, can it also play a role for the supranational division of power and the participation of minorities? The last section places political power-sharing in a context of conflict resolution, especially in multicultural societies. The chapter ends by stressing that power-sharing is not just an institutional arrangement, but that it also has to be based on the specific culture of a society that intends to practice it.

By highlighting the many ways that constitutions vary, comparative constitutional law raises interesting and important causal questions: What explains cross-national constitutional variation, and what are the real-world consequences of different constitutional arrangements? But comparative constitutional law scholarship so far has done relatively little to address these issues of constitutional causes and consequences in a rigorous manner. In this paper, I argue that scholars have much to gain from taking causality seriously in comparative constitutional law, and I suggest that scholarship on comparative politics and comparative political economy provides useful insights about how this might be done. First, I provide an overview of recent comparative constitutional law scholarship to highlight the pervasive issues of causality that it raises. Second, I introduce some of the interesting work that political scientists and economists have done on comparative constitutional law. They are asking questions about the origins and consequences of constitutions that are similar to those raised in comparative constitutional law scholarship - but they are framing them in explicitly causal terms, developing positive theories about cause-and-effect relationships, and testing them empirically using social science methods of inference. Third, I illustrate one such method that can be used to address causal claims and causal questions in comparative constitutional law. Using regression analysis of cross-national data on constitutions, government spending, and other institutional, demographic and economic factors in 80 democracies, I test a series of hypotheses about the effects of different constitutional arrangements on government spending. I also show how multiplicative interaction terms can be used to model and empirically test for conditional relationships between constitutions and various political, social or economic outcomes. I conclude with a proposed agenda for empirical comparative constitutional law, outlining its theoretical, methodological and pedagogical implications.

This contribution is a review of the research handbook in comparative constitutional law, titled Comparative Constitutional Theory edited by Gary Jacobsohn and Miguel Schor. It was published in 2018 by Edward Elgar Publishing. Every law library worthy of the name should acquire it for the benefit of constitutional scholars and advanced students of constitutional comparison.

"Comparative Public Administration" published on by Oxford University Press.

Comparative Law in Africa: Methodologies and Concepts is the outcome of the Centre for Comparative Laws in Africa inaugural methodology workshop. The book's aim is to contextualise comparative legal studies in the African continent, with the ultimate goal of paving the way for the development of a comparative methodology specifically addressed to Africa. The studies presented in this volume offer different views and perspectives around the main theme of how to methodologically approach comparative legal studies in Africa, and how to properly take into consideration all the different layers composing the African legal systems, in order to give them the proper role and the proper place.