ECC - Economics of Compliance with Constitutions

该项目的主要目的是加深我们对法律上的宪法规则与事实上的宪法现实之间差异的理解。到目前为止，各种宪法规则对政策决定和经济结果的重要性已得到充分确立。虽然人们一致认为，它们的实际执行比仅仅在法律上措词宪法条款更重要，但没有系统地分析两者之间差距的原因和后果。ECC项目通过提供对遵守宪法问题的全面经济说明，填补了这一空白。我们建议首先将法律-事实上的宪法差距概念化，这是发展一种理论来解释其原因和后果以及衡量它的先决条件。基于一些初步的推测（差距不仅取决于宪法规则的内容，还取决于文化、政治和社会经济条件等国家特征），我们将发展一个全面的理论，该理论也描述了宪法差距可能产生的影响。然后将依靠两种互补的经验方法来检验由此产生的假设——应用于全球国家样本的观测数据的计量经济学方法，以及用于在精确控制条件下研究个人行为的实验方法。了解法律-事实上的宪法差距的原因和后果具有重要的政策相关性，因为它有助于设计更好的法律制度，并使人们认识到宪法改革所能实现的局限性。波兰和德国在这个项目上的合作不仅可以将两个重要的宪法经济学研究中心的专业知识和潜力结合起来，而且还提供了在德国、波兰、和埃及（开罗大学是汉堡大学的合作伙伴），并比较各国对宪法和宪法遵守的看法，这些国家在收入水平、历史遗产和政治制度经验等许多特征上存在巨大差异。

The project's main objective is to deepen our understanding of the discrepancies between de jure constitutional rules and de facto constitutional reality. By now, the significance of various constitutional rules for both policy decisions and economic outcomes is well established. While it is agreed that their de facto implementation is more important than the mere de jure wording of constitutional provisions, there is no systematic analysis of the causes and consequences of the gap between the two. The ECC project fills this lacuna by offering a comprehensive economic account of the compliance with constitutions problem. We propose to conceptualize the de jure-de facto constitutional gap first, which is a precondition for developing a theory to explain its causes and consequences as well as for measuring it. Based on a number of preliminary conjectures (the gap will not only be determined by the content of the constitutional rules but also by country characteristics such as culture, politics and socio-economic conditions), we will develop a comprehensive theory that also describes likely effects of a constitutional gap. The resulting hypotheses will then be tested relying on two complementary empirical approaches - econometric methods applied to observational data for a global sample of countries, as well as experimental methods that are used to study individual behavior under precisely controlled conditions. Understanding the causes and consequences of de jure-de facto constitutional gaps is of significant policy relevance, as it helps to design better legal institutions and creates awareness of the limits of what constitutional reform can achieve. The Polish-German cooperation on this project allows not only to combine the expertise and potential of two important centers of research in constitutional economics, but it also provides a unique opportunity to conduct experiments in Germany, Poland, and Egypt (where the University of Cairo is a partner of the University of Hamburg) and compare the perceptions of constitutions and constitutional compliance across countries with substantial differences in many characteristics ranging from income levels to historical legacies and political regime experience.