Empirical constitutional economics: Onward and upward?

Empirical constitutional economics has made a huge leap forward over the last decade. Interesting insights into the effects of constitutions have been discovered. Rather than summarizing the state of the art, this paper identifies some of the current shortcomings and proposes a number of extensions. It calls for recognizing additional constitutional institutions as explanatory variables, as well as the incorporation of additional dependent variables. Its major emphasis is, however, on calling for the next logical step in this field, namely to endogenize constitutions.

► Some proposals regarding the future development of empirical constitutional economics are made. Among them are the need for a metric that allows us to measure the gap between de jure and de facto constitutional rules.
► To further develop the notion of “constitutional equilibrium”.
► To inquire into possible complementarities between cross-country research and individual case studies.
► To develop an “art of constitutional political economy” that could guide real-world constitution-makers in designing constitutions.