The Content of Authoritarian Constitutions

This paper examines the formal characteristics of constitutions, using the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) database, to provide some basic descriptive data on authoritarian and democratic constitutions. The authors develop the concept of the "authoritarian constitution" and find that an authoritarian constitution will have only marginally fewer rights, or details about leader selection, than a democratic constitution. Moreover, the authors find evidence that authoritarian constitutions tend to converge towards democratic constitutions over time.