Linking Constitutional Content and Civil Society Relationships

将宪法内容与公民社会关系联系起来

• 批准号: 1451100
• 负责人: Kiyoteru Tsutsui
• 金额: $ 17.88万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1451100&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Linking; Constitutional; Content; Civil; Society

This project seeks to understand how the contents of national constitutions change over time and how those changes affect civil society relationships in different countries. It focuses specifically on content related to strategies toward incorporation of minority groups into public and private domains and examines what consequences they might have on majority-minority relationships. The history of a national constitution represents changing understanding of the model of a nation. In many countries over time, it is the case that, with the rise of rights discourse, cultural rights of ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority groups often become constitutionally recognized, enabling citizens freedom to practice their culture to the extent such practice does not undermine the cultural unity of the nation. This research will propose to answer the following questions: How have these transformations changed over time? Who were the leading countries in these transformations, and what precipitated them to make those changes? Furthermore, have these changes in constitutional provisions about civil society relationships produced any changes in the actual practice of minority rights protection? This project tackles these questions by collecting data on all national constitutions in the world from 1789 to 2010 and coding them into three indexes of majority-minority relationships: the cultural homogeneity model, which emphasizes congruence of cultural and civic units; the individual cultural rights model, which allows minorities to practice individual cultural rights primarily in the private sphere; and multiculturalism, which promotes and protects minority groups' collective cultural rights. Using these indexes, and drawing on insights from sociology of law and globalization studies, the project will examine the causes and consequences of changes in constitutional stipulations of minority rights. The project will reveal the influence of global factors on seemingly national legal processes. The project will also use innovative methodologies -- multi-dimensional scaling and plagiarism detection software -- to examine more precisely how legal models diffuse globally and will present a model for future research on legal changes. As a detailed effort to collect comprehensive cross-national data on how constitutional minority rights provisions have changed over the last two hundred plus years, it will advance scholarly and public understanding of minority and ethnic relations, especially as they relate to globalization. The results of the research will be disseminated broadly and globally in presentations and publications that are accessible to policy makers and lay audiences.

该项目旨在了解国家宪法的内容如何随着时间的推移而变化，以及这些变化如何影响不同国家的民间社会关系。它特别侧重于与将少数群体纳入公共和私人领域的战略有关的内容，并审查它们可能对多数-少数群体关系产生的后果。国家宪法的历史代表了对国家模式的理解的变化。随着时间的推移，在许多国家，随着权利话语的兴起，族裔、语言和宗教少数群体的文化权利往往得到宪法承认，使公民能够自由地实践其文化，只要这种做法不破坏国家的文化统一。这项研究将提出回答以下问题：这些转变如何随着时间的推移而变化？在这些变革中，哪些国家处于领先地位？是什么促使它们做出这些变革？此外，宪法中关于民间社会关系的规定的这些变化是否在保护少数群体权利的实际做法中产生了任何变化？该项目通过收集1789年至2010年期间世界各国宪法的数据并将其编码为多数群体与少数群体关系的三个指数来解决这些问题：文化同质模式，强调文化和公民单位的一致性;个人文化权利模式，允许少数群体主要在私人领域行使个人文化权利;和多元文化主义，促进和保护少数群体的集体文化权利。该项目将利用这些指数，并借鉴法律社会学和全球化研究的见解，审查少数群体权利宪法规定变化的原因和后果。该项目将揭示全球因素对看似国家的法律的进程的影响。该项目还将使用创新方法-多维尺度和剽窃检测软件-更精确地研究法律的模式如何在全球传播，并将为今后研究法律的变化提供一个模式。作为一个详细的努力，收集全面的跨国数据如何宪法少数民族权利的规定已经改变了在过去的两百多年来，它将促进学术和公众对少数民族和民族关系的理解，特别是因为它们涉及到全球化。研究结果将在政策制定者和非专业人员都能得到的报告和出版物中广泛地在全球传播。