Constitutional drafting is an increasingly central element of political reconstruction in both transitioning democracies and shattered states.  It is also increasingly a transnational activity, involving a plethora of international actors, both governmental and nongovernmental, that provide support and advice on process and substance.  Despite all this activity, we still lack theoretical agreement on the metrics of constitutional success. Nor do we have clear tools in practice for gauging the consequences of constitutional choice. Nevertheless, real world constitutional designers ought to have tools to understand the consequences of their choices.  Both as an academic matter and as a practical matter, learning from previous constitution-making episodes seems infeasible without a framework for identifying and estimating the salient measures of constitutional design success and failure.

Some constitutions are designed to solve very discrete problems: for example, ending a civil war, integrating previously disenfranchised social groups, or reorienting government toward democracy. In these circumstances, there are very local criteria that would have to be applied to assess performance. On the other hand, there may be external criteria that could be applied to a multiplicity of cases.  Constitutions generally strive to limit agency problems and facilitate the creation of public goods, for example.  The workshop will consider both kinds of approaches to the problem.

This workshop—and the book that will be produced based on papers presented—will bring together scholars engaged in constitutional design, as well as practitioners, to engage on a range of theoretical and mid-level problems concerning the defining and measurement of constitutions’ performance. Theoretical perspectives will be comingled with case studies from country experts, as well as thematic papers that look at a particular institution or policy problem across several cases.