Some notes on finding information about constitutions

An important aspect of your group assignment is tracking down accurate information about your country's constitutions.  This involves finding 1) up-to-date documents, including recent amendments, 2) accurate translations, and 3) older versions / iterations of your constitution.  Most national governments publish their constitutions online (you can find them through a quick google search), and many include official translations.  However, older versions are not as easy to locate.  Importantly, you'll also need to find historical information about the constitution-writing process.  All these information types are rarely in one location.

Accordingly, I have listed a number of good resources on the right-hand column of the front blog page, under "Constitution Links".  You can find more information about these links after the page jump.

Please note that links that have a "UM" prefix are library resources that require you to be logged into the UM internet network.  If you are already connected (e.g. you are using your computer on-campus), then you'll be fine.  If you are off-campus, you'll be directed to login with your uniqname and password.

I've included detailed instructions on how to access these sites, but if you still have problems, then you should contact the UM reference librarian.

1) Constitute

• This should be your go-to place to find contemporary constitutional texts. You can also search for specific terms / concepts, and they will spit back the relevant sections in the constitution.  

2) World Constitutions Illustrated

• This is a great, great resource for historical constitutional texts.  They have accurate translations of almost every constitution in the world, and in many cases, they also post older constitutional versions as well.  
• Importantly, WCI includes analyses of many constitutions, written by legal and political experts, which you can find by following links to book chapters and papers.  These address the historical background to constitution-writing, amendments / changes over time, and topics of current controversy.

3) Comparative Constitutions Project

• This is the data page for the Elkins, Ginsberg, and Melton book that we use for class.  It incorporates a lot of the cross-national data that is used in the book's analysis.  
• If you are enjoy looking at large datasets (!), then you can look up a whole host of comparative information about constitutions, including important historical dates, the specification of institutional details, civil rights, etc.  You can download their entire data file by going to the "Data&Analysis" page, and then clicking on "Download Data".  This will give you the option of downloading a zip file that includes a slew of different datasets in various formats.
• For your analysis, one of the more useful data is the full list of constitutional amendments and revisions, which is actually quite difficult to find.  Download the entire CCP data file first, and then open the "ccpccev1_1-Constitutional Chronology" folder.  There, you'll find a codebook and a text file that includes amendment / revision information.  If you open this file in Excel, it will automatically adjust columns / rows.

4) Constitution Writing and Conflict Resolution

• This site is part of Jennifer Widner's (Princeton) project on the politics of constitution-writing in post-colonial or post-authoritarian states since 1975.
• The neat / useful part is the country case files, which are 3-4 paragraph descriptions of the constitution-writing process.  This includes information on who the included stakeholders were, what process was used to vote / select the constitution, etc.
• You can find these case files by going to the "Country Reports" page, and then finding your country's constitution.