We explore how ideas from infectious disease and genetics can be used to uncover patterns of cultural inheritance and innovation in a corpus of 591 national constitutions spanning 1789–2008. Legal “ideas” are encoded as “topics”—words statistically linked in documents—derived from topic modeling the corpus of constitutions. Using these topics we derive a diffusion network for borrowing from anc...

Two explanations for the importance of trusting constitutions are offe-red : First, constitutions that convey trust towards citizens have posi-tive effects by fostering civic virtue. A crucial factor of a trusting con-stitution is the extent to which the citizens are allowed to actively par-ticipate in the political process. We present empirical evidence thatparticipation vi...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to investigate the psychological characteristics of the Sasang constitutions by using Braverman nature assessment (BNA). METHODS One hundred seventy-four students participated in this study, and among them, the 142 individuals who had clearly identified Sasang constitutional types were used for the analysis. Sasang constitutions and the Braverman tempe...

A constitutional guarantee of access to essential medicines has been identified as an important indicator of government commitment to the progressive realization of the right to the highest attainable standard of health. The objective of this study was to evaluate provisions on access to essential medicines in national constitutions, to identify comprehensive examples of constitutional text on ...

1 A partial draft of this paper was circulated under the title ‘‘Discretionary Policy and Economic Volatility’’ in October 1995. We thank Robert Becker, Camelia Bejan, Marco Celentani, V. V. Chari, Russell Cooper, John Driffill, David Levine, Rody Manuelli, Albert Marcet, Ken West, and Bill Zame for helpful comments, without implicating them in the results. Earlier versions of the paper were pr...