Directory of constitutions

Constitutions are lengthy and versatile documents, on which the efficient working of a country largely depends. They reflect a lot about the ideology and thinking of the countries they govern. Combine the constitutions of 160 countries and you have a unique kind of data analysis, possible only with arcane computing skills.

The Comparative Constitutions Project, a project supported by the National Science Foundation, was an attempt to assess the sources and consequences of constitutional choices. The investigators also collected data on the formal characteristics of written constitutions, both current and historical, for most independent states since 1789. William S. Hein and Company and the Oxford University Pressalso provided materials for the project from their online collections of constitutional texts.

Google Ideas, an inter-disciplinary think-tank, became interested in the project, hoping to explore how technology can help improve the design of these constitutions and make them available for comparative analysis to the public. The result was constituteproject. org, an online directory of constitutions that users can systematically compare across a broad set of topics. Users can quickly find relevant passages, do filter searches, save a part for later analysis and even download extracts.

The website currently includes the constitution that was in force in September 2013 for nearly every independent state in the world since 1789. As you would expect from a project endorsed by Google, the site interface is clean, intuitive and responsive. You can begin browsing by country or by topic, depending on what you’re looking to find. The website is a boon for researchers and those trying to understand the process of how a constitution is written, as it also includes the amendments. —Atul Dev