Replication Data for: Do Constitutional Rights Make a Difference?

Although the question of whether constitutional rights matter is of great theoretical and practical importance, little is known about whether constitutional rights impact government behavior. In this paper, we test the effectiveness of six political rights. We hypothesize that there exists a difference between organizational rights–most notably, the rights to unionize and form political parties–and individual rights. Specifically, we suggest that organizational rights increase de facto rights protection, because they create organizations with the incentives and means to protect the underlying right, which renders these rights self-enforcing. Such organizations are not necessarily present to protect individual rights, which could make individual rights less effective. We test our theory using a variety of statistical methods on a dataset of constitutional rights for 186 countries. The results support our theory: organizational rights are associated with increased de facto rights protection.

尽管“宪法权利是否具有实质意义”这一问题兼具重要的理论与实践价值，但学界对于宪法权利是否会对政府行为产生影响仍知之甚少。本文针对六项政治权利的实施有效性展开实证检验。我们提出理论假设：组织权利（organizational rights）——最具代表性的如组建工会与组建政党的权利——与个体权利存在差异。具体而言，我们认为组织权利能够提升事实上的（de facto）权利保护水平，因为这类权利会催生具备相应激励与手段来保障核心权利的组织，从而令此类权利具备自我执行性。而保障个体权利的此类组织未必存在，这可能会削弱个体权利的实施效果。我们采用多种统计分析方法，基于涵盖186个国家的宪法权利数据集对本文提出的理论进行了实证检验。研究结果验证了本文提出的理论：组织权利与更高水平的事实上的权利保护显著相关。