The New York Times reports that the US Constitution is losing influence, based on a starting point of an unsourced Time report claiming in 1987 that “Of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”
But in Time, there are no specifics. And it is hard to imagine a framer looking at the Senate (which lets you invent a state by drawing a box on the map where nobody lives and give it two Senators) or the Electoral College (about whose craziness do we really need to say anything?) and saying “Mmm, I want me some of that hot Constitutional jury-rigging.”
Were the Timesmen perhaps just counting all constitutions that have an independent president?
It turns out the actual study the NYT links is more narrow, and interesting, than Time’s blithe remark: it’s about rights. The scholars used the world’s constitutions to generate a “generic” list of rights, then calculated the similarity of actually existing constitutions to the generic list. Here’s the table of those most and least like the generic constitutional rights.
The US is not on either side. Here’s the table showing wherein the US differs from the generic constitution (which spans a page break in the article, so is split here).
“Generic” is not of course “better,” but it’s curious that we diverge so much from our fellows in guaranteeing rights – though hardly surprising in the areas of unionization and property rights.
9 comments
February 6, 2012 at 5:00 pm
Craig Burley
As far as convergence of enumerated rights goes, most countries are post-Euro-colonial (certainly the plurality are) and therefore will tend to converge in two ways: first, towards the legal cultures of the countries that bore them, and second, towards the international legal norms popular during the decolonization period, from roughly 1957 to roughly 1980.
Eight of the countries on that list of most-similar are former UK colonies and current Commonwealth members; the other two are former French colonies. And most of them, quite strikingly, were very late decolonizers: Djibouti, Botswana, the Solomon Islands, St. Vincent, Antigua, St. Kitts, Grenada. So they had more models to copy from, and post-colonial constitution-makers have tended towards the inclusive rather than the exclusive.
February 6, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Craig Burley
And for those reasons, it’s not really surprising that the US differs widely from the international consensus. The US constitution is extremely old as constitutions go, and that there is so much overlap is really an indication of how respected it is as a constitutional document. Modifying the US constitution is very difficult in practice, so it has largely not caught up to the post-WW2 revolution in rights theory; for that reason it remains out of step with documents like the UN Declaration or the constitutions of post-colonial states.
February 7, 2012 at 8:41 am
Anderson
They found a bar on torture in the US constitution!
Making the U.S. an embarrassingly prominent example of the well-known fact that rights are only as good as the institutions that protect them … just like the USSR.
… I think John Yoo should get into the constitution-writing business. Sort of a boutique practice. It would be good for some rueful laughs.
February 7, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Andre Mayer
The US Constitution was not intended to be a full-blown constitution in the modern sense; that’s why it’s so short. It is, let’s say, somewhere about midway between the UK’s Act of Union and the abortive European Union document. Its original purpose was simply to establish a frame of federal government, without much in the way of protections of rights. The addition of the Bill of Rights was no doubt an improvement; there’s no “no doubt” about the 14th Amendment; these are both “fixes.” Other countries may copy our federal system and structure of government, but even if deeply influenced by our rights they would be exceedingly unlikely to put them down on paper in a similar way.
February 8, 2012 at 3:17 am
Dave
Everybody knows that the Constitutional Convention was just copying Montesquieu’s version of what he thought the English ‘constitution’ was. Also, since 99% of the ways in which the US political system actually functions have nothing to do with the vague phrases scribbled down by Gouverneur Morris in 1787, discussion of antiquity and originality is moot.
February 8, 2012 at 9:06 pm
chris
“Right to work” on that list doesn’t mean the Orwellian thing it means in the U.S., does it?
Also, of course, the fact that (e.g.) judicial review and presumption of innocence aren’t in the U.S. constitution in so many words doesn’t mean they aren’t considered constitutional rights in the U.S.
My mind is slightly boggled by the idea of constitutions that claim to have freedom of religion *without* separation of church and state. How do they expect that to work? The state can tax me and use the money to support a religion I disagree with, and pass that religion’s beliefs as laws, but I’m still free to disagree with it as long as I obey the commandments and pay tax to support the churches? Not much of a religious freedom, is it?
February 13, 2012 at 8:20 am
ajay
My mind is slightly boggled by the idea of constitutions that claim to have freedom of religion *without* separation of church and state. How do they expect that to work?
See “The UK”. Somehow one manages.
February 15, 2012 at 6:51 pm
urbino
One is prompted to ask, as one so often is, what is up with Norway and Australia?
February 15, 2012 at 6:58 pm
urbino
See “The UK”. Somehow one manages.
Funny how separation of church and state sort of fades as an issue when your citizens are not, by and large, more than nominally religious. (Of course, it also helps when the official head of both has almost no real power in either.)