300 unique conceptual tags organize constitutional excerpts from nearly all independent states in force as of December 26, 2017. The dataset was developed by Zachary Elkins for the Comparative Constitutions Project and deposited with QDR. It includes cleaned and tagged texts from in-force constitutions, informed by a public-facing design principle.
Use Cases
- Analyze the prevalence of specific rights like 'Free Expression' across national constitutions based on the paragraph-level tagging.
- Compare constitutional structures and powers, such as 'Head of State Powers', using the hierarchical conceptual ontology.
- Train NLP models to identify constitutional themes based on the tagged excerpt corpus.
- Study the evolution of constitutional concepts by linking tagged excerpts to the broader Comparative Constitutions Project historical dataset.
Strengths
- Includes excerpts from nearly all independent states' constitutions in force as of a specific date (December 26, 2017).
- Features a hierarchical ontology with approximately 300 unique conceptual tags applied at the paragraph level.
- Designed for readability and parsimony, informed by its intended use for both academics and public users.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
- Last updated 2025-10-20 20:00:18; freshness should be verified as the data snapshot is from 2017.
Provenance
- Source
- Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP), deposited with QDR.
- Collection Method
- Textual excerpts derived from the CCP's core dataset, encoded with tags from its conceptual inventory.
- Time Range
- Constitutions in force as of December 26, 2017.
- Freshness
- Snapshot data from 2017; metadata last updated 2025-10-20.
- Geography
- Nearly all independent states as identified by Ward and Gleditsch.