Linking Constitutional Content and Civil Society Relationships

本项目旨在了解国家宪法的内容如何随时间而变化，以及这些变化如何影响不同国家的民间社会关系。它特别关注与将少数群体纳入公共和私人领域的战略有关的内容，并研究它们可能对多数-少数群体关系产生的后果。一部国家宪法的历史代表了对一个国家模式理解的变化。随着时间的推移，在许多国家，随着权利话语的兴起，少数民族、语言和宗教群体的文化权利往往得到宪法的承认，使公民能够在不破坏国家文化统一的情况下自由地实践自己的文化。这项研究将提出回答以下问题：这些转变是如何随着时间而变化的？哪些国家在这些变革中处于领先地位？是什么促使它们做出这些变革？此外，关于公民社会关系的宪法条款的这些变化是否对保护少数群体权利的实际做法产生了任何变化？本项目通过收集1789年至2010年世界上所有国家宪法的数据，并将其编码为多数-少数关系的三个指标来解决这些问题：文化同质性模型，强调文化和公民单位的一致性；个人文化权利模式，允许少数民族主要在私人领域行使个人文化权利；多元文化主义促进和保护少数群体的集体文化权利。利用这些指标，并借鉴法律社会学和全球化研究的见解，该项目将研究少数民族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法律程序的影响。该项目还将使用创新的方法——多维缩放和剽窃检测软件——更精确地研究法律模型如何在全球范围内扩散，并为未来的法律变化研究提供一个模型。作为一项详细的工作，收集了关于宪法中少数民族权利条款在过去200多年中如何变化的全面的跨国数据，它将促进学术界和公众对少数民族和民族关系的理解，特别是在它们与全球化有关的情况下。这项研究的结果将在决策者和非专业读者可以获得的简报和出版物中广泛和全球传播。

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.