Crafting compliance – The role of inclusion and participation in constitution-making

Over the past decade, a concerning global trend has emerged in which governments increasingly ignore constitutional constraints. One theoretically promising strategy to address this widening implementation gap is constitutional reform. Replacing ineffective constitutions with more robust institutions should bind the hands of politicians and close the gap between constitutional promises and reality. However, the success of these reforms hinges on the procedural design. The most debated desiderata in constitution-making are cross-partisan inclusion and direct public participation. Ex ante, both seem to be relevant for constitutions to become effective. Employing inverse propensity score matching and entropy balancing, we find that participation is less important than expected. On the other hand, inclusion has historically been the core driver of improved rights implementation. We attribute this positive effect to the establishment of effective institutions of horizontal control, which facilitate citizen coordination in defense of constitutional principles. Our findings suggest, that inclusiveness at the elite-level and participation of citizens are neither equivalents nor substitutes – without the former, a constitution is unlikely to succeed.