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In Response to: The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution

David Law and Mila Versteeg have used their considerable legal and empirical skills to identify what they provocatively describe as the “declining influence of the U.S. Constitution,” or of what they sometimes call “American constitutionalism.” This claim has been headline-grabbing in important part because of the larger sociolegal context, in which the question of American hegemony in the world of global politics and economics is deeply unsettled. Declining influence in the design of constitutions thus resonates with a larger set of anxieties about the role of the United States in the world.

An alternative to seeing greater variations among constitutional instruments as a sign of decline in the influence of the U.S. Constitution within a framework of power hierarchy and competition, is instead to see the increased variations in a framework of evolution and diffusion, and as a sign of the success—not the failure—of the U.S. constitutionalist project. To read “decline” into greater variation may, then, be simply a reflection of anxieties in other spheres, rather than a troublesome development in its own right. In the rest of this comment, I offer brief thoughts on the influence of the U.S. Constitution and on the challenges of accurately and completely tracking such influence. I close with some questions about whether and why influence matters.

In Response to: The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution

It was with great interest that we read David Law and Mila Versteeg’s thoughtful article on the influence of the U.S. Constitution. Their piece contributes some very useful and clearly drawn empirical benchmarks, which will undoubtedly advance the conversation about the historical role of the U.S. Constitution in interesting and even provocative ways. Law and Versteeg provide many empirical nuggets to consider. We take the opportunity here to examine and elaborate upon two of their central themes: (1) the historical trajectory and timing of drift from the U.S. Constitution; and (2) whether such drift should be understood as a decline in influence. In some sense, our analysis complements and extends theirs. Appealing to a broader set of data, we clarify the timing and magnitude of any drift away from U.S. constitutional principles. However, we also offer a very different version of history than they do. If one pushes further than do Law and Versteeg with respect to the conceptualization and measurement of constitutional similarity, two trends are apparent. First, constitutions have incrementally and regularly taken on new bells and whistles; we call this constitutional modernization. Second, despite this modernization, the influence of the U.S. Constitution remains evident; in fact, it has become increasingly more central compared to competing nineteenth-century alternatives.

In Response to: The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution

Of the many questions raised by David Law and Mila Versteeg’s important article, I want to focus on two. First, as a methodological matter, do they measure constitutional convergence and divergence in the right way? Second, what is the relationship between quantitative, large-n work of the genre represented by Law and Versteeg’s article and small-n, qualitative work that has hitherto been the favored methodological approach in comparative constitutional law and politics?